The Text of an Hypothetical Speech Given to the Council on Foreign Relations by President Bradley on the six month anniversary of the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Broadcast Live Nationally.

Ladies and Gentleman, Members of the Board, My Fellow Citizens,

In 1989 our nation’s century long war with totalitarianism ended in victory. The ten years that have followed have seen an American foreign policy without purpose, structure and meaning. I stand before you today pledging that from this day forward my administration’s policy will have the purpose of the just, the structure of the rational and the meaning of the free. (polite applause)

We live in a global community, a world where billions of dollars change hands at the touch of a keyboard, wrecking whole economies; a world where famine and poverty strike in a silent cascade of despair; a world of increasing environmental degradation, where natural resources are extracted and used with impunity, no thought given to what will come tomorrow; and it is a world where the denizens of terror can strike without warning, provocation, and cause with the deadliest weapons man has yet conceived.

These failures must be corrected, for we live in a dangerous time.

(Smiling) It is also a global community of allies whose economies are increasingly interdependent, with economies generating more wealth than at any other time in history; a world of friends, a place where an American can step off a plane in Paris, Sao Paolo or Seoul with only a passport, finding business opportunities, seeing historical monuments, and making new friends; a world where organizations with global reach improve the lives of millions everyday.

The liberty of an open, compassionate, interconnected globe must be expanded, for we live in a time of opportunity.

It is a world, my fellow citizens, that we have done much to create in our own image.

Yet this task is not done and urgently awaits us. In our history we have faced graver trials and have overcome each of them, stronger, richer and freer.

It will be the purpose of my administration to address the issues vital to our international security and global prosperity.

On Security

We have been savagely attacked. And there is no moral justification, no right, and no cause for what occurred on that sad September day last year. Let us not be mistaken with what hatred our enemies desire our destruction. They are cunning, evil and determined and they will be destroyed. This nation will not tolerate, regardless of the perceived injustices of our enemies, the wanton murder of innocents. We will bring war to our enemies everywhere they are, in the bright light of the global media and the dark lairs of terrorist secrecy, we will hunt them down, and they will know the terror of the righteous, the might of the just, and the fury of the proud.

I stand before you as the leader of a government who is marshaling our resources and rededicating ourselves to the task of annihilating our enemies. We did not choose this fight, but we will finish it.

I will soon submit to the Congress a bill requesting the complete overhaul of our intelligence agencies. They have failed us and they must be reformed. I will not stand for the old politics of blame. The sacred blood of over 2,000 Americans forces us to put new emphasis on human intelligence gathering and analysis. Our intelligence agencies will be reformed and they will work as a team.

* In my request I am calling for:

*The Counter Terrorism Department of the FBI to be merged into the CIA, with identical statutory authority as they have previously enjoyed.

* All Intelligence agencies, NSA, DIA, Naval Intelligence, etc are to be moved into the CIA, controlled by the Director of the CIA and run by the Director of the CIA.

* I humbly request of Congress a doubling in funding for analysis, over the next four years, and a tripling over the next eight. Our failure was not one of gathering intelligence, it was a failure of analysis. This must change.

To every American citizen I ask you to remember your country, in its hour of need.

* Finally, Mr. Tenet has agreed to resign, and I am nominating, as his successor, Rudy Giuliani. His skills at reforming bureaucracies need no introduction (shocked silence, followed by wild applause as Mr. Giuliani enters the room).

Ladies and Gentlemen, Board Members, Fellow Citizens,

For almost ten decades it has been the policy of the United States of America that no one power should dominate any region that is vital to our interests. This is our policy. And it shall remain our policy. In the aftermath of September 11, it is clear, to members of this government, that certain nations have played a small, but significant role in the planning for the attacks that tragically shocked this nation on September 11. We know who you are. You harbor, aid and abet terrorists. Therefore you are terrorists. The prerogatives of sovereignty do not give you the right to hatch plans that seek to spread mayhem and destruction beyond your borders. (polite, but skeptical applause)

This nation did not allow Milosevic to spread his mayhem and destruction beyond his borders and we will not allow Iraq to do the same thing. The threat that Iraq poses to the security of the region and the prosperity of the global community is clear. And it must be halted. All weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed.

Traditional international law, going back to the time of Grotius, sanctions pre-emptive action against an immediate threat. Iraq poses an immediate threat to his neighbors, us and the global community,

*Therefore, I will request from Congress a formal Declaration of War. Our nation must have the necessary tools to fight, the necessary unity and the necessary will.

And I encourage our allies in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, to take careful note of what we do and what we say.

On Multilateralism

America has brought much good to the world. America will continue to bring much good into the world. After the great cataclysm of World War II, the United States set about to reform what went wrong in the interwar years with an energy, determination and compassion seldom witnessed in the annals of history. The time has come for a new effort to rid the world of the overwhelming suffering in regions both vital and peripheral to our interests, because our true interests lie in compassion, conservation and prosperity.

I cannot call upon Congress to ratify the Kyoto accords. The terms of this treaty are too onerous. But I do call for a new global environmental summit to renegotiate the treaty, to be held in San Antonio, Texas next year, on the anniversary of this speech.

What I can call upon Congress to do is the following:

*Recognize that the continued reliance on foreign oil is both detrimental to our security and a drain on our prosperity.

*Therefore, I ask the Congress to open up 1/3 of ANWR for exploration but this must be met with a statutory 15% increase in CAFE standards within the next four years, followed by another 1/3 of ANWR being opened up on the condition that another statutory 15% increase in CAFE is legislated.

*I request Congress enact the Tobin Tax on all currency speculation that falls within the sovereignty of the United States and all monies to be set aside into a special fund aimed at responsible debt relief for third world nations that meet the necessary criteria.

*I pledge to work with Congress to find an equitable national energy policy that spread the burdens and benefits to all citizens of this great nation.

For too long America has been perceived as a wasteful, arrogant spendthrift. This perception must be reversed.

We must rekindle the fires of magnanimity that gave us our purpose in the aftermath of World War II.

We are citizens of a global community.

If wethe United States demand the right to infringe upon the sovereignty of other countries--by ferreting out their unsafe nuclear materials or uprooting their terrorist cells--in the name of preemption, we cannot obsessively reject even minor infringements upon our own sovereignty, as many Americans today do. We must understand, in short, what the architects of the Post World War II settlement understood in the early years of the cold war--that the United States needs not only the resolve to meet its enemies on the battlefield but also the generosity and liberal spirit to help keep fragile societies from becoming battlefields.

Thank you very much,

God Bless America

President Bradley