    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George W. Bush (2004, Book I)]
    [February 4, 2004]
    [Pages 178-182]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the ``Churchill and the Great Republic'' Exhibit
    February 4, 2004

        Thank you all very much. I'm honored to join you as we welcome a
    magnificent collection to the Library of Congress. I've always been a
    great admirer of Sir Winston Churchill, admirer of his career, admirer
    of his strength, admirer of his character--so much so that I keep a
    stern-looking bust of Sir Winston in the Oval Office. He watches my
    every move. [Laughter]
        Like few other men in this or any other age, Churchill is admired
    throughout the world. And through the writings and his personal effects,
    we feel the presence of the great man, himself. As people tour this
    exhibit, I'm sure they'll be able to smell the whiskey and the cigars.
    [Laughter]
        I appreciate Jim Billington for
    hosting this exhibit and for hosting me. It's good to see
    Marjorie. I appreciate the members of
    Winston Churchill's family who have come: Lady Mary Soames, the daughter; Winston Churchill III--the man bears a mighty name--and his wife,
    Luce; Celia Sandys,
    who is a granddaughter. Thank you all for coming. We're honored to have
    you here in America.
        I'm pleased to see my friend the Ambassador from the United Kingdom
    to America, Sir David Manning, and Lady
    Manning here as well. I appreciate the
    Members of Congress who have come--the chairman. We've got a couple of
    mighty

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    powerful people here, Winston, with us today: Chairmen Lugar and Warner, Senator Bennett, Congressmen Bill Young,
    Doug Bereuter, Jerry Lewis, Tom Petri, Vern
    Ehlers, and Jane Harman. I'm glad you all are here. Thanks for taking time to
    come.
        This exhibit bears witness to one of the most varied and
    consequential lives of modern history. Churchill's 90 years on Earth
    joined together two ages. He stood in the presence of Queen Victoria,
    who first reigned in 1837. He was the Prime Minister to Elizabeth
    II, who reigns today. Sir Winston met
    Theodore Roosevelt, and he met Richard Nixon.
        Over his long career, Winston Churchill knew success and he knew
    failure, but he never passed unnoticed. He was a prisoner in the Boer
    War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying
    voice of the Second World War and a prophet of the cold war. He helped
    abolish the sweatshops. He gave coal miners an 8-hour day. He was an
    early advocate of the tank, and he helped draw boundary lines that
    remain on the map of the Middle East. He was an extraordinary man.
        In spare moments, pacing and dictating to harried secretaries, he
    produced 15 books. He said, ``History will be kind to me--for I intend
    to write it.'' [Laughter] History has been kind to Winston Churchill, as
    it usually is to those who help save the world.
        In a decade of political exile during the 1930s, Churchill was
    dismissed as a nuisance and a crank. When the crisis he predicted
    arrived, nearly everyone knew that only one man could rescue Britain.
    The same trait that had made him an outcast eventually made him the
    leader of his country. Churchill possessed, in one writer's words, an
    ``absolute refusal, unlike many good and prudent men around him, to
    compromise or to surrender.''
        In the years that followed, as a great enemy was defeated, a great
    partnership was formed. President Franklin Roosevelt found in Churchill
    a confidence and resolve that equaled his own. As they led the Allies to
    victory, they passed many days in each other's company and grew in
    respect and friendship. The President once wrote to the Prime Minister,
    ``It is fun to be in the same decade with you.'' And this sense of
    fellowship and common purpose between our two nations continues to this
    day. I have also been privileged to know a fine British leader, a man of
    conscience and unshakable determination. In his determination to do the
    right thing and not the easy thing, I see the spirit of Churchill in
    Prime Minister Tony Blair.
        When World War II ended, Winston Churchill immediately understood
    that the victory was incomplete. Half of Europe was occupied by an
    aggressive empire. And one of Churchill's own finest hours came after
    the war ended in a speech he delivered in Fulton, Missouri. Churchill
    warned of the new danger facing free peoples. In stark but measured
    tones, he spoke of the need for free nations to unite against communist
    expansion. Marshal Stalin denounced the speech as a ``call to war.'' A
    prominent American journalist called the speech an ``almost catastrophic
    blunder.'' In fact, Churchill had set a simple truth before the world,
    that tyranny could not be ignored or appeased without great risk. And he
    boldly asserted that freedom--freedom was the right of men and women on
    both sides of the Iron Curtain.
        Churchill understood that the cold war was not just a standoff of
    armies but a conflict of visions, a clear divide between those who put
    their faith in ideologies of power and those who put their faith in the
    choices of free people. The successors of Churchill and Roosevelt,
    leaders like Truman and Reagan and
    Thatcher, led a confident Alliance that
    held firm as communism collapsed under the weight of its own
    contradictions.
        Today, we are engaged in a different struggle. Instead of an armed
    empire, we face stateless networks. Instead of massed

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    armies, we face deadly technologies that must be kept out of the hands
    of terrorists and outlaw regimes.
        Yet in some ways, our current struggles or challenges are similar to
    those Churchill knew. The outcome of the war on terror depends on our
    ability to see danger and to answer it with strength and purpose. One by
    one, we are finding and dealing with the terrorists, drawing tight what
    Winston Churchill called a ``closing net of doom.''
        This war also is a conflict of visions. In their worship of power,
    their deep hatreds, their blindness to innocence, the terrorists are
    successors to the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. And we are
    the heirs of the tradition of liberty, defenders of the freedom, the
    conscience, and the dignity of every person. Others before us have shown
    bravery and moral clarity in this cause. The same is now asked of us,
    and we accept the responsibilities of history.
        The tradition of liberty has advocates in every culture and in every
    religion. Our great challenge is to support the momentum of freedom in
    the greater Middle East. The stakes could not be higher. As long as that
    region is a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will produce men
    and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends. We
    seek the advance of democracy for the most practical of reasons, because
    democracies do not support terrorists or threaten the world with weapons
    of mass murder.
        America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle
    East. We're challenging the enemies of reform, confronting the allies of
    terror, and expecting a higher standard from our friends. For too long,
    American policy looked away while men and women were oppressed, their
    rights ignored, and their hopes stifled. That era is over, and we can be
    confident. As in Germany and Japan and Eastern Europe, liberty will
    overcome oppression in the Middle East.
        True democratic reform must come from within. And across the Middle
    East, reformers are pushing for change. From Morocco to Jordan to Qatar,
    we're seeing elections and new protections for women and the stirring of
    political pluralism.
        When the leaders of reform ask for our help, America will give it.
    I've asked the Congress to double the budget for the National Endowment
    for Democracy, raising its annual total to $80 million. We will focus
    its new work on bringing free elections and free markets and free press
    and free speech and free labor unions to the Middle East. The National
    Endowment gave vital service in the cold war, and now we are renewing
    its mission of freedom in the war on terror.
        Freedom of the press and the free flow of ideas are vital
    foundations of liberty. To cut through the hateful propaganda that fills
    the airwaves in the Muslim world and to promote open debate, we're
    broadcasting the message of tolerance and truth in Arabic and Persian to
    tens of millions. In some cities of the greater Middle East, our radio
    stations are rated number one amongst younger listeners. Next week, we
    will launch a new Middle East television network called Al Hurra, Arabic
    for ``the free one.'' The network will broadcast news and movies and
    sports and entertainment and educational programming to millions of
    people across the region. Through all these efforts, we are telling the
    people in the Middle East the truth about the values and the policies of
    the United States, and the truth always serves the cause of freedom.
        America is also taking the side of reformers who have begun to
    change the Middle East. We're providing loans and business advice to
    encourage a culture of entrepreneurship in the Middle East. We've
    established business internships for women to teach them the skills of
    enterprise and to help them achieve social and economic equality. We're
    supporting the work of judicial reformers who demand independent courts
    and the rule of law. At the request

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    of countries in the region, we're providing Arabic language textbooks to
    boys and girls. We're helping education reformers improve their school
    systems. The message to those who long for liberty and those who work
    for reform is that they can be certain they have a strong ally, a
    constant ally in the United States of America.
        Our strategy and our resolve are being tested in two countries in
    particular. The nation of Afghanistan was once the primary training
    ground of Al Qaida, the home of a barbaric regime called the Taliban. It
    now has a new constitution that guarantees free election and full
    participation by women.
        The nation of Iraq was for decades an ally of terror ruled by the
    cruelty and caprice of one man. Today, the people of Iraq are moving
    toward self-government. Our coalition is working with the Iraqi
    Governing Council to draft a basic law with a bill of rights. Because
    our coalition acted, terrorists lost a source of reward money for
    suicide bombings. Because we acted, nations of the Middle East no longer
    need to fear reckless aggression from a ruthless dictator who had the intent and capability to inflict great
    harm on his people and people around the world. Saddam Hussein now sits
    in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to
    torture chambers and rape rooms and dumped in mass graves. Because the
    Ba'athist regime is history, Iraq is no longer a grave and gathering
    threat to free nations. Iraq is a free nation.
        Freedom still has enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. All the
    Ba'athists and Taliban and terrorists know that if democracy were to be,
    it would undermine violence--their hope for violence and innocent death.
    They understand that if democracy were to be undermined, then the hopes
    for change throughout the Middle East would be set back. That's what
    they know. That's what they think.
        We know that success of freedom in these nations would be a landmark
    event in the history of the Middle East and the history of the world.
    Across the region, people would see that freedom is the path to progress
    and national dignity. A thousand lies would stand refuted, falsehoods
    about the incompatibility of democrat values in Middle Eastern cultures.
    And all would see, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the success of free
    institutions at the heart of the greater Middle East.
        Achieving this vision will be the work of many nations over time,
    requiring the same strength of will and confidence of purpose that
    propelled freedom to victory in the defining struggles of the last
    century. Today, we're at a point of testing, when people and nations
    show what they're made out of. America will never be intimidated by
    thugs and assassins. We will do what it takes. We will not leave until
    the job is done.
        We will succeed because when given a choice, people everywhere, from
    all walks of life, from all religions, prefer freedom to violence and
    terror. We will succeed because human beings are not made by the
    Almighty God to live in tyranny. We will succeed because of who we are,
    because even when it is hard, Americans always do what is right.
        And we know the work that has fallen to this generation. When great
    striving is required of us, we will always have an example in the man we
    honor today. Winston Churchill was a man of extraordinary personal
    gifts, yet his greatest strength was his unshakable confidence in the
    power and appeal of freedom. It was the great fortune of mankind that he
    was there in an hour of peril. And it remains the great duty of mankind
    to advance the cause of freedom in our time.
        May God bless the memory of Winston Churchill. May God continue to
    bless the United States of America.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:31 p.m. in the Northwest Gallery of the
    Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. In his remarks, he
    referred to James H.

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    Billington, Librarian of Congress, and his wife, Marjorie Ann; Queen
    Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom; and
    former President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.