... The third point I want to make is that offense always wins first. Ever since the first person walked out of a cave with a club and before people figured out you could put sticks together and stretch an animal skin over it and make it a shield, the people who take up arms win first, and then sooner or later, hopefully sooner, decent people get together and figure out how to defend themselves. When we were born, people thought there would never be a way to defend against continuing nuclear war and we would exterminate ourselves and we found the only known defense, which was mutually assured destruction, but it worked, and no bomb was ever dropped again after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

... So this is troubling, this Anthrax business. I know it is, and it scares you. 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. A lot of good people have been working hard on this for a long time. In the years that I served, career law enforcement officials working with our intelligence services and others and people around the world prevented many, many more terrorist attacks than were successful. Attempts to blow up the Holland tunnel, the Los Angeles airport, to blow up planes flying to the Philippines, an attempt on the Pope's life, an attempt to blow up the biggest hotel in Jordan over the Millennium weekend, to destroy a Christian site in the Holy Land, to plant bombs in cities in the Northwest and the Northeast, and many others. They worked hard to strengthen the biological weapons convention and to pass the chemical weapons convention. They worked hard to begin to build our stock of vaccines, and antibiotics and to support an organized civilian preparedness against the kind of problems we face in the current Anthrax scare. Clearly, we needed to do more. September the 11th happened. And so we are now about the business of improving our defenses with regard to air travel and other critical infrastructure, against attacks from biological weapons and in two other areas that I think are quite important. We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and get it, and we need some legislation on that, and we also need to continue to work on cyber-terrorism, which is profoundly important. So far we've just been laughing about some of these viruses that have invaded our computers and go all around the country in no time, but a great deal of damage could be done to our country unless we are prepared. And one area where we are woefully lacking is the simple use of modern computer technology to track people who come into this country with information already readily available. It does not require us to erode people's civil rights or human rights. But our governmental capacity, notwithstanding the fact that we have tripled our investment in counter-terrorism in the last few years, to do what is normally done by mass mailing firms, is not there. And we have to support this and we have to support the current government and whatever decision they make to do it, even if they have to contract with private companies for awhile, but we should be able to find people who come here and stay around a long time before they organize a big hit. So we will have to support all these things.

... But the larger point I want to make is that we will do this, and for all of you who've never lived through anything like this, whose childhood was never colored by any kind of threat of security: when we were kids a lot of us used to have to do drills where we would go to fallout shelters where we would run if anybody ever dropped a nuclear weapon, and you learned to live with it. And the people that were taking care of us did a good job, and it never happened. So the first thing I want to say to you is you cannot be paralyzed by this. No terrorist strategy has ever prevailed, people who want to damage always win the beginning but people always figure out defenses. And the ultimate purpose of terrorism is not to win military victories anyway but to terrorize, to make you afraid to get up in the morning, afraid of the future, and afraid of each other. I met an Egyptian the first day I went down to see the people in the crisis center after September 11th. This big Egyptian fellow with tears in his eyes said, "I'm an Egyptian Muslim American, and I hate what happened worse than you do probably, and I'm so afraid my fellow American will never trust me again." That's what they want. So what I want to say to you first is, we have to support the war in Afghanistan and the work at home, and it may be frightening to you, but you have to stay centered, and you have to understand that you're trying to create something that is really special, a country where everybody can have a home if they share the same set of values. And you can't give in to it. It's going to be all right.

(Some Remarks as delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton Georgetown University). November 7, 2001