I'm delighted to be here.  It's very nice to be asked back to an audience that has heard me before, and particularly an audience that has heard me two or three times before.  That's a real tribute and a real compliment and while I'm surprised, I'm very pleased.  It's very nice to be back here and see so many friends and people with whom I worked when I was with President Reagan as Governor and before, and have an opportunity to be introduced so very nicely by Mrs. Glazer.  Guil and Diane have done so much for so many different groups all over the country and, indeed, all over the world.  I got to know them very well, particularly from when Guil was in Washington a great deal working with the White House staff.  So it's a pleasure indeed to be back and see so many good old friends and to remember the days when I did have the opportunity and privilege of working with Governor and then President Reagan.

I was telling a story at dinner that emphasized the enormous strength of President Reagan’s physical strength.  After the assassination attempt – a very horrible week that we had – I spoke to a surgeon who had run the operation the night before and I said, "Did the president have a good night?" and he said, "No, frankly he didn't.  First of all he felt compelled to entertain his nurses all night, and secondly, it was a very difficult operation.  We had to probe to get the bullet out.  I've never seen in my life a stronger, better chest development than the president had.  That's fine for his health, but it's very hard for the surgeons to have to pull through that because this was an explosive bullet."  They had to get it out and they had to keep him under anesthesia a lot longer than they wanted to.  I saw the president about two days after that and I was never so horrified in my life, because I didn't think he would really ever fully recover, and yet within six weeks he was back at his ranch in his beloved California, chopping wood and riding horses and doing all the things that he most enjoyed there.  His recovery was complete and very, very rapid.  So it all reminded me in talking with the people here tonight of those very great days when we were all so privileged to have the opportunity to work with him and to watch him in action.  It's a great pleasure to me now to see that he's getting the dues that he is really entitled to.  He was much underestimated.  People ask me how history will treat him and I think history will treat him very kindly.  I often recall, too, what Winston Churchill’s favorite remark was.  He said he knew that history would treat him kindly because he would write the history.  President Reagan wrote the history by being president and, with his policies, basically winning the Cold War and doing a very great deal to lay the foundations for much of the greatness that we have today.

I thought I'd talk a little bit about the problems in Iraq.  Why there are problems, why we did what we had to do, and how well we did it.  We hear a great deal now about all the problems of post-war Iraq and our critics are saying that we didn't plan very well for the reconstruction of Iraq or deal with the country after the war was over and that much of this could have been foreseen and so forth.  We have to bear two things in mind when we hear all that criticism.  The first is that it tends to, and it's designed to, make people forget the absolutely stunning military victory that was won in such a short time.  After it happened, we sort of took it for granted that that's the kind of thing we expect when the American forces are in action.  But look what was done.  They were transported thousands of miles overseas, the bases that they had in Kuwait were rudimentary, and yet from those bases they moved directly into Iraq and advanced 365 miles on the ground in less than two weeks, scattering literally everything before them and bringing about the surrender without a shot being fired by at least six Iraqi divisions, divisions that had been counted in the pre-war days as being capable of inflicting enormous casualties and damages on us and our allies in the invasion. 

Why did they surrender?  Well, first of all they didn't want to work for Saddam Hussein any longer.  Secondly, they had an eyewitness view of the massive, overpowering strength of the American military and its capabilities which stunned them even then because they had been told for so long so many lies to the effect that we were weak and decadent and we wouldn't even go to war and that our troops would run and all the rest of it.  All nonsense, of course, but it was a fantastic military victory joined by many of our allies such as Great Britain and Poland and Spain and many other countries, that although in listening to many of the people who criticize now you would think that the world was all against us. 

The other thing I think is important to keep in mind besides that stunning military victory is the fact that this is an even-numbered year.  It's an election year—and it's also leap year, that's rather secondary—but it's going to be an election year, and as a result we are seeing every conceivable argument that could be made to denigrate and to criticize and to ultimately defeat President Bush and the administration because it is widely understood that they're not going to change their policies.  We're not going to be forced to cut and run in Iraq, we're not going to be pushed out, we're going to finish the job, and as that is done and more and more people recognize the magnitude of the achievement there are going to be people who will intensify the volume and tone of their criticism.  In other words, you really have to realize what happens in a political year and how very difficult it is to get anyone to pay attention to the facts, or acknowledge the facts.  The whole concentrated force is pushed in favor of doing anything they can to oust the president and the administration.  And, of course, particularly now, you have eight or nine candidates of the other party, whom I always unkindly refer to as the nine dwarfs, who have been competing with each other in trying to attack President Bush so that we are bearing a steady cacophony of attacks of criticism, things that went wrong and nothing at all about things that went right.

Well, what was accomplished?  For one thing, one of the most brutal and vicious dictators in the world's history was deposed.  He was deposed with extraordinarily low casualties on our part – one casualty is too many everybody knows and agrees – but the predicted number of casualties was very high.  Fortunately, they were nothing like that.  The other thing that was achieved was that the world now, I think, has a better idea of what Saddam Hussein was like and why it was completely impossible ever to have any peace as long as he was there.  He made a lot of promises at the end of the Gulf War.  He said that he would allow U.N. inspections, that he would change many of his policies, that he would never go after Kuwait, that he would pay reparations, that he would agree that there should be no flights over portions of Iraq. What he did was to break every single one of those promises, one after the other.  Sometimes some of them lasted as long as a couple of months, sometimes a couple of weeks. 

He continued to attack the Kurdish groups in the north and attacked them with poisoned gas which he had and had manufactured biological weapons.  He used them against his own people.  We're now uncovering mass graves with thousands and thousands of people whom he had put to death because they had the temerity to oppose him.  It was a reign marked entirely by terror and by brutality, and there was no dealing with this, there was no way in which his policies could ever be accepted.  I personally think that it's too bad that we accepted his promises at the end of the Gulf War because it was, I think, apparent what kind of person he was even then.  This time there's no problem about that, because his regime was toppled and he himself was found finally in a spider hole, as was described by the soldiers, and he is now being interrogated so that we don't have to worry about this person any longer. 

What we do have is a lot of these people in the Baath party, people who derived their livelihood from their association and loyalty to Saddam.  It is their actions, including the suicide bombings and the terrorist activities against our troops and against any of the Iraqis themselves who work with our troops, that's where most of the problems are coming from and they will continue to come from there from time to time.  They are lessening; we're doing a great deal to stop it.  It's not a matter of not planning, it's not a matter of not expecting it, it was a matter of trying to deal with terrorists who operate not as groups, and not as armies of regular commission or traditional military forces but in a very cruel and brutal manner, including the suicide attempts in which they kill themselves along with anybody else who gets in the way.  So, we really did, I think, without any question, what we had to do and we did it extraordinarily well. 

I had a very nice meeting with some high school students, who may be here tonight, just before coming in, and one of the questions was, "We went ahead without getting the agreement or approval or the permission of the United Nations.  What are your comments?"  I told him very frankly that my comments were that we didn't need any permission to safeguard America or its interests from anybody and that in the United Nations, as it is now constituted, a very small number of individual nations can block any effective action by the United Nations.  Germany and France have opposed it from the beginning, and I think when you go back into the reasons you'll see that it's not a very noble basis for opposing it.  Both Germany and France, and Russia, to a very considerable extent, loaned huge amounts of money to Saddam Hussein which he used for weapons to use against us and against his own people.  They were fearful that they weren't going to be repaid.  And so they weren't willing to take any kind of effective action against him. 

Remember that we did go to the United Nations.  Sixteen resolutions were passed.  Each resolution promised that if Saddam Hussein didn't behave, serious consequences would follow, and the serious consequence was the passage of another resolution saying that serious consequences would follow.  Now, Saddam Hussein among other things is no fool, and when he saw that nothing happened, that these resolutions were passed and promptly ignored, he completely misread our capabilities and our intentions.  He was quite sure that we would never attack and he was quite sure that nobody else would ever take any effective action to put him off and so I think it was important that we did not allow opposition within the United Nations to stop us doing what we had to do. 

We had a great deal of support from individual members of the United Nations and from individual members of NATO, and we're still getting it and it is vital that we have it.  There's also a canard around that says that we didn't want any support or help from anybody else.  We wanted to fight it alone.  This, of course, is total nonsense.  We wanted all the help we could get.  We literally begged the United Nations to come back in again because the only action that they took was to withdraw a very small support group that they had because they said it was too dangerous.  We have asked them to come back many times. 

So, it's important, I think, when you read all these criticisms that we have the background.  It's an election year and they're doing all this and most of these criticisms are an attempt to destroy and defeat the administration and replace it.  It is going to continue until the election is over.  I think one of the ways of best expressing it was Mr. Churchill, who said that the real problem with democracies is that you're always having elections, that six months before an election nobody could do anything and six months after an election nobody knows what to do, and as a result you're paralyzed a great deal of the time.  President Bush could take council from that sage advice and develop the doctrine of the preemptive strike.  Preemptive strike simply means, and it's more than simply because it's a major change, that we're not always going to wait to be attacked before we think about defensive action ourselves.  When you do that, which has been our policy since almost the beginning of the country, you cede to the other side, you give to the other side the option for determining when and where the attack on the United States will come, and that's an enormous advantage.  It means that we have to respond, we have to try to react, we have to try to recoil and gain back that strength that we may have lost, we had it in World War II and two or three other places.  President Bush, in looking over the whole situation, concluded that this idea of waiting until you're attacked is not such a good idea always, and that while we don't want to acquire more territory or more real estate—and if we did we certainly would not be in Iraq—but it is essential that other countries, potential enemies, realize that they may not always have the privilege of deciding when and where to attack us.  They should realize that, with our immense strength, we don't want it for any purpose or requiring anything or gaining anything or gaining domination or being the world's policeman.  We are willing and ready and able to act, even if we act first, in ways that will protect and safeguard the security of the United States and will safeguard and offer the opportunity for peoples all over the world to enjoy the benefits of freedom and democracy that we've had for so long and take for granted.  That is one of the great lessons, I think, that is being learned now.

Some of you may have been rather puzzled that one of the first reactions was the fact the government in Libya decided that it would no longer have a nuclear arms program; that it would change its whole policy.   It went around the world and told people it was changing and that the inspectors from the U.N. or anybody else could come in any time they wanted and see if it was carrying out its, policies.  The New York Times – I'm sorry to be so specific – said this wasn't due to the victory of the military in Iraq but it was due to the realization that sanctions had brought about this change in the Libyan government policy.  I don't really believe that.  I think one of the things that brought it about was our demonstration of our military capabilities and our willingness to use them in a good cause. 

Some people have forgotten that we had put together many years ago a major aerial attack against Libya when we found out that they were supporting the terrorists who had caused the death of American servicemen and many others in the bombing in a Berlin discotheque.  This was a change on the part of Libya for the better and we're seeing the same thing in many other countries that have had nuclear weapons and nuclear programs and nuclear opposition and, I think, suddenly realized that they aren't going to be serving any purpose of their own by standing against the United States or trying to terrorize the world. 

We haven't yet had that reaction out of North Korea, but I'm hopeful that we will start having something like it fairly soon.  Certainly we won't get it if our only policy is to offer them more and more and hope that they might some day keep one of their promises.   That was, frankly, the Clinton policy: offering them all kinds of things, including free oil and nuclear reactors and everything else if they would give up their weapons programs.  They promised faithfully to do that and kept that promise for about two weeks.  So I think these things are being realized now and I think one of the reasons they're being realized is the strength and capabilities of our military and the strength and courage of our administration and its willingness to use those in very good causes and not lightly, not inadvisably, not from time to time, but just when it does appear that there are no other solutions.  When you had 16 resolutions of the United Nations ignored and no action taken at all, it was time to do something to demonstrate to the world, and to Saddam Hussein, that that kind of behavior could not continue.

Well, what have we actually accomplished?  We've overthrown his regime, we've overthrown a regime in Afghanistan, and we're rebuilding these areas slowly but surely.  We are reconstituting the oil fields in Iraq and we never went into Iraq because of the oil, we don't need Iraqi oil, but we thought it was important for them if they wanted to become a full-scale democracy and survive, that they should have their own means of production and their own means of assets and that is happening.  We have reconstituted the school system, the health system, the hospitals, their own military, their own security.  All of these things are progressing and progressing quite well.  You'd never know it if you read the arguments of people who want to succeed President Bush, but it is happening and it's a better Iraq in every way for those people who are now going to experience and are experiencing the fruits and benefits of democracy and freedom and liberty—the things that you and I have had all our lives and take for granted. 

We're also trying to reconstruct our alliances to the greatest extent we can, starting with NATO.  I would be hopeful that we might be able to make some structural changes in the United Nations that would make it a little more effective operation and organization than they are at the moment. 

We have had, I think, basically, great success in a very short time.  It's not even a year yet, and when you look at the differences in the daily lives of most of the people in Iraq, I think you can see that a very great deal has been accomplished and will continue to be accomplished.  That latter part is vital, it's vital that we don't lose patience, it's vital that we not get distraught by the fact that there are attacks being made on our troops and our forces, and it's vital that we remember why that's happening.  These are desperate people who want to restore the times when they prospered under people like Saddam Hussein and they're not going to be able to do that.  I think it's also important that we realize that none of this would have come about—none of this would have come about—if we didn't have the capability and used the capability of a military action. 

Bear in mind, and this is a remarkable thought which is only now coming to the world's attention, I think properly, that every man and woman in that huge army that we have in Iraq – every man and woman –wanted to be there as a volunteer.  This is a volunteer army.  This is not a conscripted, drafted army, this is not an army that has all of the problems we had in Vietnam where we forced people to serve in a war they didn't understand and didn't support.  These are people who asked to be there, and that is a remarkable thing that we shouldn't forget about.  Some people are now criticizing that very fact by saying that the burden, the whole burden, is not being borne by the nation as a whole.  It's being borne only by our volunteer army, which is another way of saying it's being borne by the people who asked to have this burden.  It's another way of saying that you're getting a far more effective army than you would have if you had a drafted and conscripted army fighting in a cause that they didn't believe it. 

So, all of these are things are to be proud of and to insist that we continue until we have finished the job.  Beginning in June or July of this year we will be turning over more and more sovereignty to the Iraqi government that is being established as we have and are continuing to do in Afghanistan.  We are replacing very terrible regimes, regimes based on terror and viciousness and violence and killing, all being replaced by a democratically-chosen people who have a different outlook and who want to have the opportunity to exercise that outlook.  That is what I hope and believe is going to continue, and I think it will with the patience and understanding of the American people, which we have already demonstrated in full measure and full motion and will continue to do so.

There are many other aspects to the war.  We haven't found weapons of mass destruction yet.  For a long time a lot of people said that proves they don't exist.  Well, we didn't find Saddam Hussein for quite a while, and even the New York Times admits that he existed.  He was found and I think we will find evidence, as we already have, as our weapons inspectors have said, that there were attempts to make and to secure biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.  Some of them, I think, were sent to other countries nearby, just as Saddam Hussein sent all of his fighter planes to Syria at the beginning of the Gulf War.  He thought he would get them back immediately, but Syria has forgotten to return most of them.  These are things that are going to continue with the patience and the strength and fortitude of the American people and the firmness of the administration. 

I think it's important to bear that in mind and realize how much has been accomplished and at the same time we realize that we will read and continue to read all of the bad news that can possibly be generated, mostly by people who hope to use it, as is their right, to change administrations.  I hope and believe that we will have the patience and the strength to realize how much has been accomplished, to realize that none of it would have been accomplished if Saddam Hussein had been left in power, and to realize that we must keep at it until not only Saddam Hussein but every vestige of support that he had is changed.  We changed regimes after World War II very much for the better and secured very real friendships and very real strength in allies.  I hope that will be the same case now and I think it will be.

I want to thank you very much for your courteous attention.  These are not cheerful topics for the most part, but as we think them through, we'll realize that there's an enormous amount of good news not only for the world but for America.  There's a great deal to be proud of, and it is important that we demonstrate our pride and demonstrate our appreciation for the magnificent job that our troops performed and are still performing.

Thank you very much for coming.  It's a delight to be with you again.