News from the Dole Institute

Remarks by Senator Bob Dole at Ground Zero

Addresses 'Support Our Troops Rally',
Organized by New York Construction Trades Unions

April 10, 2003

To visit this place is to stand on sacred ground. Ground hallowed by the lives, as well as the deaths, of nearly 3,000 people who may have come from 80 countries, yet were all New Yorkers at heart. They are very much with us this April morning. In this season of new life, we can see fresh beginnings all around us. Lower Manhattan is poised for renewal. Soon a bold new skyline will rise here, along with a memorial to those who died here. While others imagine this New York on their drawing boards, the job of actually building it falls to you. It will be your memorial to the victims of 9/11--and it will be a labor of love.

The death squads who hijacked our airplanes and assaulted our cities on 9/11 thought they could defeat the United States. They quickly discovered they were wrong--dead wrong. Because you can topple a tower, but you can't kill an idea. Nowhere is the idea of America more alive than here, in this city where a hundred languages and a thousand traditions thrive in a freedom unimaginable to the zealots in their caves.

We've grown up fast in these nineteen months--just as we did in the months after the last unprovoked attack on American soil. Before Pearl Harbor I'd never been east of Kansas City, never ridden a bus, never seen a skyscraper. Exactly sixty years ago, as a student in an Army program at Brooklyn College, I caught my first glimpse of the world's greatest city. Then, as now, the greatness of New York lay, not in its tall buildings, but in the people who build them. In their skill, their bravery, their brotherhood and their love of country. President Bush had this in mind when he stood in the smoking rubble of Ground Zero and promised that soon, the terrorists who had knocked down these towers would be hearing from all of us. He's a man of his word. Methodically, relentlessly, with the help of our allies and the resolve of our own people, he has set out to identify, isolate, and eliminate the fanatics who confuse mass murder with martyrdom. We have broken up their cells. We have shut down their training camps. We have emptied their bank accounts. We have arrested many of their ringleaders, and the rest are being hunted like the common criminals they are.

We have crushed their dictatorship in Afghanistan, and now we have liberated the people of Iraq from a strutting psychopath. The statues are coming down. No more torture chambers. No more acid baths. I'd call Saddam's a gangster regime--but that would be an insult to gangsters. For decades Saddam Hussein made Iraq a living Hell.

We don't know whether Saddam is still living, but we know he has a place reserved in Hell.

If you want a definition of freedom, look at the Iraqis dancing in the streets of Baghdad, embracing our troops and cheering our president. And then raise a salute to our British allies as they march into Iraq's second largest city to the sound of a bagpipe playing Scotland the Brave. The gulag Saddam and his henchmen took three decades to create, Tommy Franks and his coalition forces took three weeks to dismantle. Apparently, for some that's not fast enough. There is an old saying that generals like to fight the last war. That may be true for some of the TV generals, the four-stars wannabes and a few journalists who haven't gotten their heads out of the quagmireŠbut not the men and women of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never before have so many gotten so much so wrong. Remember the famous pause--supposedly because we didn't have enough troops on the ground, or supplies for the troops? Some pause. Remember the front page articles predicting a stalemate, or worse? It'll come as news to the Army's Third Infantry or the First Marine Division. Remember when Peter Arnett went on Iraqi TV to compliment himself for stoking opposition to President Bush and the American war effort? Well I've got good news and bad news for Baghdad Pete. The good news is there is an opening at the Iraqi Information Ministry. The bad news is, it's already been promised to Michael Moore.

Today Iraq is liberated--and President Bush is vindicated. They say I'm a member of the Greatest Generation. Do you want to know who's the Greatest Generation? It's the valiant men and women of all ages, races and nationalities who are fighting and dying to free the people of Baghdad and Basra. Like you, they wear hard hats. Because they are builders, too. They're building a free Iraq on the ruins of a brutal tyranny. Sure, a few of their contemporaries may lie down in New York streets and call it a die-in. But the glory of America is all those other young men and women who face real death, every day, in order to protect the very freedoms perverted as street theatre.

More than a hundred of these heroes have made the supreme sacrifice. Soldiers like Private Brandon Sloan of Bedford Heights, Cleveland, a minister's son and high school football star who joined the army to serve his country. Or Spc Jim Kiehl of Des Moines, Iowa, whose 20 year-old wife is due to deliver their child next month. Our hearts go out to their families, and to the families of brave journalists like Michael Kelly and David Bloom. We grieve for PFC Lori Piestewa, a 23 year old single mother who left a Hopi Indian reservation to join the Army's 507 Maintenance Company based in Ft. Bliss, Texas. "Our family is proud of her." says her brother. "She is our hero." She is our hero, too. So is Lori's Army roommate, Jessica Lynch--and the Iraqi lawyer, known only as Mohammed, who alerted American forces that one of their own lay in a nearby hospital, her life in the balance. "Believe me," he said afterward, "I love Americans." He proved it by risking everything to direct the Navy Seals, Army Rangers, and Air Force Special Ops who appeared out of nowhere to rescue Jessica.

Writing last week in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger told of four young Marines who were reportedly offered the use of a journalist's satellite video phone. Instead of calling his own family, one of the soldiers ran off to find his sergeant who hadn't talked to his pregnant wife in three months. As for the other three, they didn't call their parents--they called the parents of a comrade who had died a few days earlier near Nasiriya.

"Where do they get young men like this?" the correspondent asked.

I'll tell you where they get them. From Fort Sills, Oklahoma and Wellsville, Kansas--Harbor Creek, Pennsylvania and Gallatin, Tennessee--Houston, Texas and Tracy, California and yes--from Brooklyn. Wherever they come from, their courage and character make the rest of us shake our heads in wonder. They make us more resolute in confronting whatever dangers may lie ahead. Most of all, they make us proud. May God bless them, and bring them home safe. May God bless our president, and all those entrusted with responsibility in these momentous days. May God bless the people of New York. And may God Bless America.

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