Thank you so much, Mr. President, and congratulations class of 1999. I know that all that stands between you and your diplomas is this speech, so I'll try to keep it short. I wanted to join you last night for Midnight Madness, but I didn't have my ID. So I'm here today to offer instead a brief explanation of why -- unexpectedly, incomprehensibly -- you will be graduating when the United States is at war.

But first let me say something about one of your most distinguished alumni, Ed Muskie, who graduated here some 60-plus years ago and whom I worked for when he was Secretary of State. He was an inspirational man and a proud son of Bates, and a proud son of this great state. He had great judgment. He had fantastic personal values, which I think is absolutely essential whatever you do in life and increasingly rare. He was wise...and he had the worst temper I ever saw.

I remember one day in the State Department. He had been a senator, as all of you know for many years, and had he remained in the Senate would have been the dean of the Senate within a few years. But he gave all that up to become Secretary of State at a moment of crisis in the last year of the Carter administration. And the transition from the Senate to the State Department was not easy for him, and I will recount one brief story of his famous temper.

When some Korean general staged one of their endless coups, as a senator he would have simply put in a resolution saying we denounce them, we shouldn't deal with them. He suggested that one day in a meeting with a number of us in his office, and several of the people in the room said, "You can't just do that as Secretary of State." And he took the papers in his lap and threw them towards the ceiling, and as they drifted down towards the floor he said, "Why can't I, I'm the Secretary of State, aren't I?" And we said, "Well that's just the problem. Now that you're Secretary of State you can't do that sort of thing." And he regained control of his temper and mumbled something, and it was characteristic of his strengths that he would explode and get himself under control. I don't know if he learned either of those attributes here at Bates, but you should all be very proud of Ed Muskie. It's wonderful that his name is enshrined permanently here at your great college.

Now, commencement day speeches, of course, are supposed to be full of wisdom, and I can only offer you advice that was passed on to me from someone else at a commencement address a few years ago when he said to the students, "Remember, when you go out in life it's not who you know, it's whom you know." Art Buchwald once gave a commencement speech, which in its entirety went, "Boys and girls, your parents have given you a perfect world, don't screw it up."

But as I said a moment ago, when you entered this college in 1995, it would have been hard to imagine that as you graduate and as the century comes to an end, NATO war planes are bombing Yugoslavia, that American pilots are at risk and that there is a serious debate going on about whether, or under what conditions, American and other NATO ground troops will enter another country.

To be sure, just at the time you entered we were negotiating the end of the Bosnian war. And we did send 20,000 young American men and women into Bosnia as part of a 60,000-person NATO force. But that was under negotiated conditions, and they went in as peacekeepers. And in the three and a half years since they've been there, and despite the crisis next door in Kosovo, not one American, not one NATO troop, has been killed or wounded. Many of you may have friends who have already served there, and I know that the history department here will be sending a contingent of its students to next-door Croatia next fall to study, so you probably have familiarity with that, but Kosovo is a much more difficult situation.

I want to say, before I return to the situation that we face in Kosovo, that as you go on into the next phase of your life, I hope that you will consider doing more in the field of public service than you may originally have planned. I don't mean this simply for those people who are already planning a career in government or public affairs or politics, but for all of you to give part of your life to public service. It's rewarding, although it can be dangerous. But at the end of your life, when you look back on it, you want to be able to say more than you had good family and you had a good job; it would also be good to say you did something in the public arena. I do not necessarily mean, by that, government service itself. There are many other ways to serve. The president mentioned my association with Refugees International; frankly it's as rewarding to work in a private organization as it is in the government on an issue like this. And I hope that you will work in these fields, whether its at home or overseas.

The public arena, as Ed Muskie knew, is a place of combat and it's dangerous, but values and ideas still matter in life. This country, in this century, has seen three great issues compete for strength, for primacy: democracy, communism and fascism. Clearly, at the end of the century, democracy has emerged the stronger. Both fascism and communism have collapsed of their own internal contradictions, and the fact that they were, in the end, against human nature. Democracy Ñ by which I mean, and I should be clear on this, the very idea of personal freedom Ñ is the strongest idea this century has cast up. And it has defeated the tyrants Ñ Hitler, Stalin and others Ñ who have sought to bring it down. But the struggle has been very expensive. In terms of lives, tens of millions have died. In costs, incalculable. And here at home, in the struggle for human equality, our own version of democracy and freedom, people have died as well, in the freedom marches in the South in the '60s when I was in college, and elsewhere. But I want to stress to you that the struggle is not over. There are new challenges to this idea. And this brings me back to the Balkans.

Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as Rwanda, are examples of a powerful old idea that is resurgent in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and fascism Ñ a powerful and dangerous idea, which I believe is a direct threat to democracy. I refer, of course, to ultra-nationalism, to extreme nationalism masquerading under such phrases as "ethnic purity" or self-determination for one ethnic group at the expense of others. And let me be clear to all of you, when you read about ethnic hatred in Bosnia or Kosovo, be clear on what "ethnic" means. "Ethnic" is just another word for "race." It is a racial problem, and don't be fooled by the complicated word "ethnic." Tyranny of one ethnic group, because it's a majority in a single locale, not only threatens the minority of other ethnic groups in that location, but it also threatens the members of the majority who are living in another area. Let me be clear, one person's majority area is another person's minority area, and everyone is a majority in one area and a minority in another. So the very idea of tyranny of the ethnic majority is anti-democratic, although it often masks itself in the cloak of democratic words. It threatens itself and it threatens its own brethren in areas where they are a minority. And those of you who are going to Croatia later this year will see it first hand because that is an area where Croats and Muslims and Serbs used to live with each other in relative harmony and today have sought to maximize there own internal differences so that they're all suffering as a result of it.

I want to stress that ethnically pure countries are almost impossible in the modern world, with a few notable exceptions like Korea and Japan, which while not completely ethnically pure have a history of such substantial homogeneity that they have a unique tradition. But for Europe, where the tribes and ethnic groups have migrated back and forth across Europe for centuries and empires have risen and fallen, ethnically pure countries cannot exist. And, in many other areas Ñ Indonesia, India, most of Africa Ñ national boundaries and ethnic boundaries do not meet. The only choices are multi ethnic states, or else bloody wars like the ones we've seen in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, which are followed by ethnic cleansing.

For the United States, this poses an immense dilemma. If we stay out at the beginning, we can end up being pulled in at even greater cost later. We can, of course, try to ignore the outside world, and standing here on this beautiful quad at this college today, it's easy to ignore these things. But they do go on. And if they get worse, as they have in Bosnia and Kosovo, they will pull us in. So our luxury of ignoring areas, as we did in the early 1990s in Bosnia and Kosovo, which was a colossal mistake of both the United States and the European union, leaves us in the end with the explosions. We could have prevented most of the slaughter in Rwanda. We could have stopped the war in Bosnia much earlier at lower cost. And in Kosovo, where our intervention is clearly, in my view, legitimate from a moral basis, an earlier involvement might have prevented it.

I'm not here today to give you a history of Kosovo. There isn't time for that, and it's too complex. But let me just say, in conclusion, that what has happened in Kosovo in the last year has presented the West with an extraordinary dilemma; whether, on one hand, to ignore it and allow the Serb security forces to do something unconscionable, which would have seared the conscience of the world, and on the other hand to try to prevent it with all the attendant risks and controversies we now face. As I said a moment ago, I think there is no question that there is a moral and legitimate basis for the NATO action. But that doesn't mean it's easy and it doesn't mean it's without controversy. Bombing has its limits, but ground troops would pose a different and more complicated set of problems if they went in as an invading force. And that is why, at this point, the administration continues to believe that the correct process is to punish the aggressors from the air while offering them a diplomatic solution which protects the interest of the Serbs.

I want to be clear to those of you in the audience who may be of Serb background, and I must say this because it comes up every time we talk about the area, but I do not believe in collective guilt. And I do not believe all Serbs are equally responsible for the tragedy any more than all Germans were responsible for the Holocaust. But the Serb leadership, chosen by its own people, has created this tragedy. The Serb leadership has started four wars in eight years in the Balkans, and has become the most destabilizing force in Europe since the end of World War II. So the choice is not easy. Do you turn away? Or do you get involved? The controversy will, of course, continue until a solution is arrived at. One way or another, one way or another, NATO troops will be in Kosovo by the end of this year in my view. But how they enter, and on what basis, and what the political arrangements are under which they've entered, will be absolutely critical. I'm not here today to predict how that will unfold. Intense diplomatic activity is underway in Europe, in Washington and around the world to try to find a solution, but I would be misleading you if I predicted a timetable for success. Failure, however, is unthinkable. And I can assure you that 19 NATO nations are in the end going to prevail. At the end of that process, however, we will be left with a very difficult and expensive reconstruction effort.

So as you leave this great campus and enter into the world, and also to the parents and friends of the graduates here, I say to you with regret, but with an effort of candor, that the region called the Balkans, which when I was in college was something you studied in history books, will unexpectedly be part of the next century's story for the United States as well as our European allies. It was not supposed to be that way. The 21st century was going to be the era of cyberspace, the Internet, the Web and the new technologies. But history has a way of dragging us back into it. And history did not end when the Cold War ended.

And so, in conclusion, let me just say that I hope you will understand that while domestic issues are obviously of paramount importance, as we enter the next century we will still have to be heavily engaged in the world and even in areas that we had hoped we would leave far, far behind. That is part of the price of being the world's most powerful nation. You can't just go around boasting, "We're number one." It involves obligations and costs and risks. And I hope you're all proud of the fact, that difficult as it's been, the U.S. has taken a leadership role, belatedly and reluctantly, but ultimately with great force in this part of the world because it is the right thing to do. And if we pull together, I'm confident that in the end, and I hope in the not too distant future, we will prevail.

Again, to the class of 1999, my great congratulations. Thank you.

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