In his second address in Gaston Hall since Sept. 11, former President Bill Clinton said that the United States should focus on winning its current military fight while simultaneously focusing on non-violent ways to shrink the number of potential terrorists in the future.
A growing AIDS crisis, environmental concerns, worldwide poverty and a lack of education could undermine struggling democracies and lead to further terrorism, Clinton said. He argued that solutions exist to all of these problems, and the solutions would be “a lot cheaper than going to war.”
Calling democracy a stabilizing force, Clinton said most terrorism develops in non-democratic states where people are not held accountable for their actions. World-wide poverty, AIDS and global warming concerns overwhelm some democracies, and a lack of education allows terrorists to indoctrinate people into their way of thinking.
Clinton said that cases of AIDS are expected to climb to 100 million, and the next countries to face an AIDS crisis will be Russia and China.
“This will overwhelm fledgling democracies,” he said. “Today two-thirds of the cases are in Africa; tomorrow it’s everybody’s problem.”
Saying he had studied the issue extensively, Clinton said the crisis could be averted without too much money and in as little as three years. According to Clinton, education is vital; only four percent of Chinese citizens know how HIV can be spread and prevented.
Global warming, which threatens to drown coastal cities and turn some countries’ farm lands into desert, can be primarily reversed by alternative fuel technology, Clinton said. Alternative fuel would even be profitable, he said, but Americans would need to make an initial investment.
World wide poverty could be eased by offering millions of loans to individuals in poor countries, he said. Two million loans, for $50 to $60, have lifted millions out of poverty by helping them start businesses, and 20 million more loans would be cheaper than fighting, he said.
Quoting a Peruvian economist, Hernando DeSoto, Clinton said the world’s poorest people control assests worth $5 trillion. Because their assests are not safe or recognized by banks, they are unable to borrow money or gain credit based on those assests. Clinton said finding a way to legitimize the assests of these people would be easy and free and would allow millions to improve their lives.
Education is the primary way to encourage development in countries, Clinton said. Citing Brazil as an example, he said that countries that use incentives, such as free meals or monetary compensation to get kids into schools, will be in a better position in the world economy than those that don’t educate their children. Additionally, Clinton said supporting education prevents children from being indoctrinated into destructive ways of thinking. Funding education programs would be a lot cheaper than fighting a war, Clinton said.
All of the non-violent approaches to terrorism are important because the world has become increasingly interdependent in the last ten years, Clinton said.
“All these wonderful advances in technology, in science, in economics that benefited America so much required us to tear down the walls, collapse distance and spread information, and it made us more vulnerable,” he said. “It’s not like we can take care of business in Afghanistan, and then put the walls up, put the businesses back and give the information back. It’s not like we can reverse the world we live in, and you wouldn’t like it if we did.”
He told students not to let the terrorism of Sept. 11 or the recent anthrax outbreak scare them.
“This is troubling this anthrax business, I know it is, and it scares you,” he said. “And it’s troubling when 5,000 people die, not in some far away battlefield but in downtown New York on television, but you have to recognize that unless this is something different than has ever occurred in human history we will figure out how to defend ourselves and civilization will endure.”
Clinton said no military victory has ever been achieved by terrorism alone.
“You cannot be paralyzed by this, the ultimate purpose of terrorism is not to win military victories anyway, but to terrorize, and make you afraid to get up in the morning, afraid of the future and afraid of each other,” he said.
Clinton warned students not to let terrorism turn Americans against each other and those of other backgrounds.
“The terrorists killed people who came to America not to die but to dream,” he said. “They came from almost every country and almost every religion on the face of the earth, including a large number from Islam.”
Clinton cited the crusades, American slavery and the relocation of Native Americans to demonstrate that those of European descent were not free from historical guilt around historical terrorism.
“That story is still being told today,” Clinton said, “and we are still paying for it.”
“This is not a perfect society, but it is one stumbling in the right direction,” Clinton said.
