My fellow Americans, and men and women throughout the world:

Like all people of good will I condemn the actions of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Killing innocent people to make a political point is repulsive to me, whether it is done by individuals or by governments, as I will explain. As President, I am also ordering a full-scale review to be sure that everything that can be done to prevent terrorism is being done. However, I have been rethinking this question and come before you to say that heightened security is not enough.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a student at one of the best universities in the world, the son of a leading Nigerian banker. Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, Virginia was a doctor, a psychiatrist and a major in the US army. Both of these men were profoundly misguided, but they were not psychotics or homicidal maniacs so far as anyone knows. From considering their cases, and many others which have not received publicity, I have come to the conclusion that so long as we are at war with three Muslim countries (Iraq, Afghanistan and, apparently, Yemen), so long as we fill others (notably Pakistan) with drones and agents and secret weapons, so long as we patrol the Persian gulf and the Indian Ocean with aircraft carriers and armed planes, load the region up with bases, mines, and barbed wire, support in Palestine the longest and perhaps the cruelest illegal occupation in modern history, bolster dictatorships, aggrandize oil companies, Blackwaters and other “contractors,” leave the people of the region in poverty as we haul away booty, so long as these and similar acts continue, then a small minority of young people will not only make the same mistakes that Abdulmutallab and Hasan made, but will gain some tacit sympathy from a much larger number of Middle Easterners.

Unlike the Nobel Prize Committee, whose Norwegian branch demeaned itself by awarding me its highest honor, I have decided that a good speech is not enough, and that it has to be followed by action. To wit, I have today ordered the immediate withdrawal of all US military forces from the entire region that stretches between China and Europe. By immediate, I mean immediately begun: I realize that this is a long complicated process that requires us to work with others in the region, including popular forces, not something that can be accomplished over night. But I also see that this is the only way to get the United States on the right side of the Middle East. No one can be sure, but I think that the chances of the people of the region working out their own problems over time is much higher with us out of there, than with us present as an inflammatory military force. I encourage, however, a much greater presence over time of American teachers, social workers, cultural figures, musicians, writers and small, local entrepreneurs and I hope to use the billions, perhaps trillions of dollars which we will save by drawing down our military to encourage economic and cultural development in the region.

I am not naïve. I know full well that even after these measures there will be Abdulmutallabs and Hasans who will attempt cowardly and despicable acts. But unlike the present situation, our conscience will be clear and we will have the support of the overwhelming population of the region and the world. In the long run, military force can never provide security. Only responsible intersubjective dialogue based on a shared commitment to social justice can do that, and when I said, during my Presidential campaign, that we needed not just new policies but a new mindset, it was just such a dialogue that I had in mind.