[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 101 (Tuesday, July 23, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7222-S7224]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CIVILIZATION NEED NOT DIE
Mr. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, in the more than 10 months since the
attacks of September 11, 2001, all of us have been trying to bring
context and understanding to the new world challenges we are
confronting. It is at times such as this that the Senate needs wisdom
and clarity to bring such context to our times.
Often in the past, the Senate turned to one of its most distinguished
colleagues for vision and wisdom. That person, Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
understood history and the actors and actions that make history.
Recently, I came across the Harvard University commencement speech
that our former colleague, Senator Moynihan, gave this year, on the
58th anniversary of D-Day. I think all of my colleagues will benefit
from reading Pat's remarkable speech, for it gives historical context
to the times in which we are living.
I, for one, miss hearing Pat's insights into life. All of us who
served with Pat
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are better Senators because of the wisdom he imparted to all of us.
I ask unanimous consent that former Senator Pat Moynihan's Harvard
commencement speech be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Commencement Address, June 6th, 2002
(By Daniel Patrick Moynihan)
A while back it came as something of a start to find in The
New Yorker a reference to an article I had written, and I
quote, ``In the middle of the last century.'' Yet persons my
age have been thinking back to those times and how, in the
end, things turned out so well and so badly. Millions of us
returned from the assorted services to find the economic
growth that had come with the Second World War had not ended
with the peace. The Depression had not resumed. It is not
perhaps remembered, but it was widely thought it would.
It would be difficult indeed to summon up the optimism that
came with this great surprise. My beloved colleague Nathan
Glazer and the revered David Riesman wrote that America was
``the land of the second chance'' and so indeed it seemed. We
had surmounted the depression; the war. We could
realistically think of a world of stability, peace--above
all, a world of law.
Looking back, it is clear we were not nearly so fortunate.
Great leaders preserved--and in measure extended--democracy.
But totalitarianism had not been defeated. To the contrary,
by 1948 totalitarians controlled most of Eurasia. As we now
learn, 11 days after Nagasaki the Soviets established a
special committee to create an equivalent weapon. Their first
atomic bomb was acquired through espionage, but their
hydrogen bomb was their own doing. Now the Cold War was on.
From the summer of 1914, the world had been at war, with
interludes no more. It finally seemed to end with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the changes in China. But
now . . .
But now we have to ask if it is once again the summer of
1914.
Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia,
could lead to cataclysm, as they did in Sarajevo. And for
which great powers, mindful or not, have been preparing.
The eras are overlapping.
As the United States reacts to the mass murder of 9/11 and
prepares for more, it would do well to consider how much
terror India endured in the second half of the last century.
And its response. It happens I was our man in New Delhi in
1974 when India detonated its first nuclear device. I was
sent in to see Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with a statement
as much as anything of regret. For there was nothing to be
done; it was going to happen. The second most populous nation
on earth was not going to leave itself disarmed and
disregarded, as non-nuclear powers appeared to be. But
leaving, I asked to speak as a friend of India and not as an
official. In twenty years time, I opined, there would be a
Moghul general in command in Islamabad, and he would have
nuclear weapons and would demand Kashmir back, perhaps the
Punjab.
The Prime Minister said nothing; I dare to think she half
agreed. In time, she would be murdered in her own garden;
next, her son and successor was murdered by a suicide bomber.
This, while nuclear weapons accumulated which are now poised.
Standing at Trinity Site at Los Alamos, J. Robert
Oppenheimer pondered an ancient Sanskrit text in which Lord
Shiva declares, ``I am become Death, the shatterer of
worlds.'' Was he right?
At the very least we can come to terms with the limits of
our capacity to foresee events.
It happens I had been a Senate observer to the START
negotiations in Geneva, and was on the Foreign Relations
Committee when the treaty, having been signed, was sent to us
for ratification. In a moment of mischief I remarked to our
superb negotiators that we had sent them to Geneva to
negotiate a treaty with the Soviet Union, but the document
before us was a treaty with four countries, only two of which
I could confidently locate on a map. I was told they had
exchanged letters in Lisbon [the Lisbon Protocol, May 23,
1992]. I said that sounded like a Humphrey Bogart movie.
The hard fact is that American intelligence had not the
least anticipated the implosion of the Soviet Union. I cite
Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA in Foreign
Affairs, 1991. ``We should not gloss over the enormity of
this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis .
. . The corporate view missed by a mile.''
Russia now faces a near-permanent crisis. By mid-century
its population could well decline to as few as 80 million
persons. Immigrants will press in; one dares not think what
will have happened to the nuclear materials scattered across
11 time zones.
Admiral Turner's 1991 article was entitled ``Intelligence
for a New World Order.'' Two years later Samuel Huntington
outlined what that new world order--or disorder--would be in
an article in the same journal entitled ``The Clash of
Civilizations.'' His subsequent book of that title is a
defining text of our time.
Huntington perceives a world of seven or eight major
conflicting cultures, the West, Russia, China, India, and
Islam. Add Japan, South America, Africa. Most incorporate a
major nation-state which typically leads its fellows.
The Cold War on balance suppressed conflict. But the end of
the Cold War has brought not universal peace but widespread
violence. Some of this has been merely residual proxy
conflicts dating back to the earlier era. Some plain ethnic
conflict. But the new horrors occur on the fault lines, as
Huntington has it, between the different cultures.
For argument's sake one could propose that Marxism was the
last nearly successful effort to Westernize the rest of the
world. In 1975, I stood in Tiananmen Square, the center of
the Middle Kingdom. In an otherwise empty space, there were
two towering masts. At the top of one were giant portraits of
two hirsute 19th century German gentlemen, Messrs. Marx and
Engels. The other displayed a somewhat Mongol-looking Stalin
and Mao. That wasn't going to last, and of course, it didn't.
Hence Huntington: ``The central problem in the relations
between the West and the rest is . . . the discordance
between the West's--particularly America's--efforts to
promote universal Western culture and its declining ability
to do so.''
Again there seems to be no end of ethnic conflict within
civilizations. But it is to the clash of civilizations we
must look with a measure of dread. The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists recently noted that ``The crisis between India and
Pakistan, touched off by a December 13th terrorist attack on
the Indian Parliament marks the closest two states have come
to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.'' By 1991, the
minute-hand on their doomsday clock had dropped back to 17
minutes to midnight. It has since been moved forward three
times and is again seven minutes to midnight, just where it
started in 1947.
The terrorist attacks on the United States of last
September 11 were not nuclear, but they will be. Again to
cite Huntington, ``At some point . . . a few terrorists will
be able to produce massive violence and massive destruction.
Separately, terrorism and nuclear weapons are the weapons of
the non-Western weak. If and when they are combined, the non-
Western weak will be strong.''
This was written in 1996. The first mass murder by
terrorists came last September. Just last month the vice
president informed Tim Russert that ``the prospects of a
future attack . . . are almost certain. Not a matter of if,
but when.'' Secretary Rumsfeld has added that the attack will
be nuclear.
We are indeed at war and we must act accordingly, with
equal measures of audacity and precaution.
As regards precaution, note how readily the clash of
civilizations could spread to our own homeland. The Bureau of
the Census lists some 68 separate ancestries in the American
population. (Military gravestones provide for emblems of 36
religions.) All the major civilizations. Not since 1910 have
we had so high a proportion of immigrants. As of 2000, one in
five school-age children have at least one foreign-born
parent.
This, as ever, has had bounteous rewards. The problem comes
when immigrants and their descendants bring with them--and
even intensify--the clashes they left behind. Nothing new,
but newly ominous. Last month in Washington an enormous march
filled Pennsylvania Avenue on the way to the Capitol grounds.
The marchers, in the main, were there to support the
Palestinian cause. Fair enough. But every five feet or so
there would be a sign proclaiming ``Zionism equals Racism''
or a placard with a swastika alongside a Star of David. Which
is anything but fair, which is poisonous ad has no place in
our discourse.
This hateful equation first appeared in a two-part series
in Pravda in Moscow in 1971. Part of Cold War ``agit prop.''
It has since spread into a murderous attack on the right of
the State of Israel to exist--the right of Jews to exist!--a
world in which a hateful Soviet lies has mutated into a new
and vicious anti-Semitism. Again, that is the world we live
in, but it is all the more chilling when it fills
Pennsylvania Avenue.
It is a testament to our First Amendment freedoms that we
permit such displays, however obnoxious to our fundamental
ideals. But in the wake of 9/11, we confront the fear that
such heinous speech can be a precursor to violence, not least
here at home, that threatens our existence.
To be sure, we must do what is necessary to meet the
threat. We need to better understand what the dangers are. We
need to explore how better to organize the agencies of
government to detect and prevent calamitous action.
But at the same time, we need take care that whatever we do
is consistent with our basic constitutional design. What we
do must be commensurate with the threat in ways that do not
needlessly undermine the very liberties we seek to protect.
The concern is suspicion and fear within. Does the Park
Service really need to photograph every visitor to the
Lincoln Memorial? They don't, but they will. It is already
done at the Statue of Liberty. In Washington, agencies
compete in techniques of intrusion and exclusion. Identity
cards and X-ray machines and all the clutter, plus a new life
for secrecy. Some necessary; some discouraging. Mary Graham
warns of the stultifying effects of secrecy on inquiry.
Secrecy, as George Will writes, ``renders societies
susceptible to epidemics of suspicion.''
We are witnessing such an outbreak in Washington just now.
Great clamor as to what the different agencies knew in
advance of the 9/11 attack; when the President was
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briefed; what was he told. These are legitimate questions,
but there is a prior issue, which is the disposition of
closed systems not to share information. By the late 1940s
the Army Signal Corps had decoded enough KGB traffic to have
a firm grip on the Soviet espionage in the United States and
their American agents. No one needed to know about this more
than the President of the United States. But Truman was not
told. By order, mind, of Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Now as then there is police work to be done.
But so many forms of secrecy are self-defeating. In 1988, the
CIA formally estimated the Gross Domestic Product of East
Germany to be higher than West Germany. We should calculate
such risks.
The ``What-ifs'' are intriguing. What if the United States
had recognized Soviet weakness earlier and, accordingly, kept
its own budget in order, so that upon the breakup of the
Soviet Union a momentous economic aid program could have been
commenced? What is we had better calculated the forces of the
future so that we could have avoided going directly from the
``end'' of the cold War to a new Balkan war--a classic clash
of civilizations--leaving little attention and far fewer
resources for the shattered Soviet empire?
Because we have that second chance Riesman and Glazer wrote
about. A chance to define our principles and stay true to
them. The more then, to keep our system open as much as
possible, without purposes plain and accessible, so long as
we continue to understand what the 20th century has surely
taught, which is that open societies have enemies, too.
Indeed, they are the greatest threat to closed societies,
and, accordingly, the first object of their enmity.
We are committed, as the Constitution states, to ``the Law
of Nations,'' but that law as properly understood. Many have
come to think that international law prohibits the use of
force. To the contrary, like domestic law, it legitimates the
use of force to uphold law in a manner that is itself
proportional and lawful.
Democracy may not prove to be a universal norm. But decency
would do. Our present conflict, as the President says over
and again, is not with Islam, but with a malignant growth
within Islam defying the teaching of the Q'uran that the
struggle to the path of God forbids the deliberate killing of
noncombatants. Just how and when Islam will rid itself of
current heresies is something no one cay say. But not soon.
Christianity has been through such hersey--and more than
once. Other clashes will follow.
Certainly we must not let ourselves be seen as rushing
about the world looking for arguments. There are now American
armed forces in some 40 countries overseas. Some would say
too many. Nor should we let ourselves be seen as ignoring
allies, disillusioning friends, thinking only of ourselves in
the most narrow terms. That is not how we survived the 20th
century.
Nor will it serve in the 21st.
Last February, some 60 academics of the widest range of
political persuasion and religious belief, a number from here
at Harvard, including Huntington, published a manifesto:
``What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America.''
It has attracted some attention here; perhaps more abroad,
which was our purpose. Our references are wide, Socrates, St.
Augustine, Franciscus de Victoria, John Paul II, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
We affirmed ``five fundamental truths that pertain to all
people without distinction,'' beginning ``all human beings
are born free and equal in dignity and rights.''
We allow for our own shortcomings as a nation, sins,
arrogance, failings. But we assert we are no less bound by
moral obligation. And finally, . . . reason and careful moral
reflection . . . teach us that there are times when the first
and most important reply to evil is to stop it.
But there is more. Forty-seven year ago, on this occasion,
General George C. Marshall summoned our nation to restore the
countries whose mad regimes had brought the world such
horror. It was an act of statesmanship and vision without
equal in history. History summons us once more in different
ways, but with even greater urgency. Civilization need not
die. At this moment, only the United States can save it. As
we fight the war against evil, we must also wage peace,
guided by the lesson of the Marshall Plan--vision and
generosity can help make the world a safer place.
Thank you.
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