Bobby Muller
International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 1997
"The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and the
International Campaign to Ban Landmines"
November 6, 1998

Bobby Muller: Thank you. It's been a real privilege for me to be here and to meet the people here on stage, but I want to tell you something: quite a few of these folks are very regular people. Just like you. And, perhaps in no case would that apply more than to me. I wouldn't have been in the audience here, when I was in college. I would have been doing something with an athletic event, or focused in maybe on my studies. I was, really, the most average student that you could ever imagine. And, had you suggested that I would one day be appearing on a platform with people such as this, I would have said, "You're crazy." What happened? I become an advocate as a result of my life's experiences. And I'm going to say right now that if there's anything I'm going to urge students in particular to do, it's to get a little less homogenized, and get out there in the world, and expose yourself to different situations. Because I really believe that it is the relatively few among us that can intellectually arrive at a certain place of enlightenment. I think most of us need to go out there and get the hard knocks in life, learn the lessons the hard way, to sort of get it a little bit. I got it because when I was a senior in college, the war in Vietnam was going on full-tilt boogie, it was inevitable that I was going to go into the service, and one day, I was going into the student union my senior year. I was 5'8," 130 pounds; I was the ultimate runt. And there was the Marine Corps recruiter. And he stood around 6'2," 220 pounds, dress blue uniform, crimson stripe-ultimate stud-and I said, "Yeah, that's me." And, really, honestly-I hate to admit it-that machismo thing that kids have, sort of on the basis of that impression in that uniform, I joined the Marines. And I said yesterday, you should see a movie, Full Metal Jacket that Kubrick put out. The first half of the movie is about Marine Corps boot camp, and it shows you how young guys can be transformed as a result of a process. That we really are very vulnerable, and are susceptible to being altered, and manipulated. The long and the short of it is, by the time I finished my Marine Corps training-I graduated Honor Man in my class-I demanded Vietnam, I demanded infantry, and my only fear was that the war was going to end before I got a chance to get over there and do the right thing.

A long story made very short. There were more U.S. Marine casualties in Vietnam than there were U.S. Marine casualties in the entire Second World War. When I was in training, they said 85% of us, as junior officers, were going to be casualties. I went out into the field with seven other lieutenants, all of whom were medevacked before me. I lasted eight months before I took a bullet through the chest. That war was a rock 'em, sock 'em war. And when I got hit, I had the good fortune of having called in medevac helicopters for other guys that had been casualties so I got, literally, an instant medical evacuation. And with my luck, the hospital ship Repose was right off the coast from where I was that afternoon. And they wrote that, despite the instant medevac, and the extraordinary care, had I arrived one minute later, I would have died. Both lungs had collapsed, along with a severed spinal cord. I was conscious long enough to realize what had happened, and to be absolutely convinced that I was going to die. When I woke up on that hospital ship, even though I had, I think, nine tubes in me, my response on waking up was one of absolute ecstasy, joy, exhilaration. Couple of days later, the doctors came by and they said, "We've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we're pretty sure you are going to live"-and I laughed. I said, "I could have told you that as soon as I opened up my eyes." "The bad news is that you are going to paralyzed." And I remember saying, "Don't worry about it. That's O.K." I was so grateful to be given a second chance at life. And in that moment of confronting my own mortality, all of what I had put my future in-business school, corporate America-evaporated. It just didn't seem to have the same meaning any more.

I came back and I spent a year in Veterans Hospital, in New York City. And my hospital was the basis of a scandalous exposé that was on network television, in newspapers and magazines, and it portrayed the extraordinary conditions that at least some of us as returning veterans came back to. And I sometimes say that while the images could convey the overcrowding and the dilapidated facilities, they couldn't capture the despair in that institution. And the fact that my closest friend, and ultimately eight of my friends with spinal cord injury, committed suicide was better testimony. I had to fight against that system, for reasons of my own survival. By going to a war that was extraordinarily brutal, and having death and experiencing almost dying, spending a year in a hospital that was so deplorable and despairing, that's what it took to take the athlete, the dutiful student and transform him, for reasons of his own survival, to fighting against that system, and to becoming an advocate.

It was around that point that President Nixon vetoed a Veterans Medical Care Expansion Act on the grounds that it was fiscally irresponsible and inflationary to provide adequate care to America's veterans. That was the afternoon that I went to Times Square in Manhattan and blocked up traffic in the middle of the afternoon. And I said, "Wait a minute. I was a Marine Infantry Officer. I pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to kill people. I got shot, and now I come back and you tell me all of a sudden that it's fiscally irresponsible and inflationary to provide adequate medical care?" I don't think so. And I said, "You know, I must be too stupid to know what my rights are." So, I went to law school, got a law degree, and I found out that ain't the answer. What were needed were new laws.

In a very unbelievably now, to me, naïve sense, I figured that if somebody simply went to Washington and told the American people what was going on with Vietnam veterans, that with this story being told, a compassionate and caring society would have to respond. Come on, this is basic stuff. And after waiting a long time for somebody to do it, and nobody doing it, you finally get to the point when your attitude gets built up enough to say, "the hell with it-I'll do it!"

So, honest to God, a very unassuming guy simply went to Washington, D.C. with a hell of an attitude, and started talking. And I had the good fortune of having the editor of The Washington Post editorial page invite me into his office the second week I was there. He listened to the rap and said, "Hey, that's not bad." Next day, I had a full picture and big article op-ed Washington Post saying "Vietnam Veteran Advocate Arrives." It was the beginning of an extraordinary campaign of media. The Washington Post never undertook an editorial campaign as they did for the next year, on behalf of what I was advocating. Never! The New York Times picked it up; papers around the country picked it up. When The New York Times covers you, you wind up going on ABC, CBS, NBC network television, and you get a lot of amplification. But here's the bottom line, and this is the point: I got a chance to tell my story! That story got amplified, and got shared with the American public. And guess what? Not a single thing that we were fighting for was enacted into law. That's a lesson. Simply to argue for something in terms of justice, fairness, equity doesn't make it in our political process. You know, the members of Congress that came forward back then were guys like Al Gore, Tom Daschle, Dave Bonior, Leon Panetta. Yeah, give me those guys twenty years later. But back then, they were freshmen! They didn't have any political strength.

The Veterans Committees in the House and Senate were controlled by guys that had been there for a lifetime! And they had no resonance with us, as the Vietnam generation. I remember going into a Congressional hearing one day, and, I think, it was about Vet centers. And The New York Times, very dutifully, had done an editorial that morning, arguing the need for Vet centers. And the chairman of that committee holds up that Times editorial, and says, "You know, some people don't get it. Where I come from"-which happened to be Mississippi-"we don't run in harmony with New York Times editorials, we run in opposition to that." O.K. What we did is, we went grassroots. We went into the districts that the members of those committees were elected from them, and got into their editorial pages, and did their radio talk shows, and brought the pressure not from the elite establishment but back into those districts. And, finally, incrementally, we started to get the kinds programs that were so critically needed and deserved brought on line. We even got a measure of respect and recognition.

As part of the work with the Vietnam veterans, obviously, to reconcile with our former adversaries was a key part. So, in 1981, I had the privilege of leading the first group of veterans to go back to Vietnam. And it was an extraordinary meeting, and brought about a whole process of reconciliation that would be a whole other discussion. We started humanitarian programs to try and connect the American people with the Vietnamese people. And as part of the humanitarian work in the '80s, the big obstacle that was set to stand between the United States and Vietnam was Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. So we went to Cambodia.

I will simply say what I said briefly the other day: Cambodia changed my life when I went there more than the entire war experience I had in Vietnam, as brutal as that was, ever could. Because what happened in Cambodia was genocide, and it is a whole different order of the human experience. The horror that took place on the killing fields there is unimaginable. But Cambodia was kind of unique in another way. It was a country that when you went to the capital city of Phnom Penh, you saw people hobbling all over the place. Amputees. And you came to understand that there were more than 500 people every single month getting blown up by landmines. There were more landmines in Cambodia than there were people. And it was considered that Cambodia was proportionately the most disabled society of any country in the world.

Well, a couple of guys on our staff are themselves amputees, as a result of landmines during Vietnam, and we said, "Look, this is nuts. Let's start a program and do some rehabilitative work with the amputees." And by setting up a clinic, we went through a process of emotionally connecting with an issue that we intellectually understood was devastating. And I say we "emotionally" connected because the people that came into our clinics were people whose lives we came to understand and to touch. And we realized that it was the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable within the society, who were invariably winding up the victims of landmines. And that in the majority of the cases, it wasn't even military people, but it was civilian. A couple of years back, they did a survey in Cambodia, and they found that the leading cause of casualties was women going into the forest to gather firewood, because of the economic necessity to do so that, and wood is still the primary fuel. It was the kids, either playing or bringing animals out to graze, that were getting blown up.

We realized, my God, what makes landmines different from all the other kinds of weapons that you could easily say we ought to get rid of? What makes landmines different is that they are totally indiscriminate. You know, if you've got a machine gun, a rifle, an artillery piece, jet fire, whatever, you've got a target and you fire. There is a command and control function with directing that fire. Landmines-there is none. You simply set it, you bury it, you hide it, and whoever happens to step on that landmine becomes the victim. And now we know, after several years here, that in probably over 80% of the cases, the people who wind up stepping on those landmines are innocent civilians. Because again, unlike basically all the other weapons, when the conflict ends, you put the rifles and the artillery pieces and the tanks and the helicopters back into the armories. But landmines stay out where you bury them. For years and years and years, doing exactly what they are designed to do-to blow off the leg of whoever it is that happens to step on it.

That's a point that I want to come back to, right this second, because I don't want it to be lost. When I was on the hospital ship, the guys that cried the loudest were either burn victims or victims of landmines who suffered a traumatic amputation of a limb. And when they changed the dressing on that limb those guys would cry-literally, I swear, would cry-for their mothers. The guys in my office come in today and say, "Bobby, I didn't sleep last night. My foot was killing me." He doesn't have a foot; it's called phantom pains. Even though the body part is missing, you can still have these extraordinary excruciating pains. And because of the nature of what happens with landmines, all this crap gets blown up your limb-shrapnel, dirt, garbage, clothing, etc. And you invariably go through a whole series of operations, where you are treated like a piece of salami, and you keep getting resected and cut down. Landmines cause probably the most debilitating, painful kind of injury-other than, I would say, the burn cases-that you can imagine. Understand, that they are designed to do that: they limit the amount of the explosive charge purposely so that when somebody gets blown up and they are lying on the ground, they wind up being a terribly demoralizing factor for those around them. And then you are a burden on the whole logistical process of getting you medevacked.

You find out that landmines, in the millions in these countries, denied the land to these people. You couldn't bring the refugees back from Thailand into Cambodia because the land was contaminated. Oh my God, you start to realize, this stupid $3.00 weapon winds up being the major destabilizing factor in these third world countries, agrarian-based societies that are trying to recover. And you realize it's not just Cambodia, it's Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, Kurdistan, etc. Once you start to really understand this, you say, "Wait a second. This is a catastrophe!"

We came back and, learning the lessons that I talked about at too great a length before, with the Vietnam vets, we didn't want freshmen members of Congress. We went to the most powerful guy that we could find. And its hard to believe that back in 1992 there were 57 members Democratic members in the Senate-57 Democrats. The guy that controlled the money on the Appropriations Committee was Senator Leahy. And we said, so long as you've got the strength, you're the committee chair, you control the bucks, we want you. And Leahy, thank God-because of his having actually gone out of the country, unlike Jesse Helms, actually having gone to areas of conflict, and had seen what landmines were doing to victims, said immediately, "I'll help you. But Bob, you gotta understand something: it's going to take years." And I said, "Senator, that's O.K., we're going to stay with you." And he said, "Let me introduce the idea, because nobody is talking about landmines, let me introduce it with a one-year moratorium"-just to get it on the boards, and to get people to start thinking about it. And in 1992, the United States, believe it or not, unilaterally, was the first country to outlaw trafficking in anti-personnel landmines. Admittedly, Leahy used a little stealth maneuver and snuck it into law, but we did it.

I was with Leahy when he would talk about this with his colleagues, and he would visualize these children in these areas of conflict, and he would get tears in his eyes. This guy was passionate, he was committed. A year later when he went to the floor and he said, "I want your support to extend this unilaterally-enacted moratorium for three more years," the Senate voted 100 to nothing to support that. I gotta tell you, the Senate doesn't vote 100 to nothing that the moon circles the earth, for God's sakes! This was extraordinary. That inspired the world. The fact that the United States actually was at the forefront of, at least, the rhetoric to get rid of landmines meant, hey, maybe there's an opportunity here. And other countries started to put together their efforts and said, "Let's go." And Leahy banged our president, mercilessly, to keep it up. He would introduce legislation, each year, ratcheting up the stakes on the landmine issue. He actually got our president to go the General Assembly of the United Nations and call on the world community to outlaw this weapon, to get rid of it.

The president's problem is that the world community listened to him and they took him seriously. And they ultimately delivered an international agreement that, as you probably know, the United States didn't sign! You've got 133 countries out there that sign; we, who inspired this campaign, really world-wide, and in many ways drove it, wound up at the last minute faltering, and not doing it. Fair question: what's going on here? In '96 we took out a full-page New York Times open letter to the president. And we said, "Mr. President, getting rid of landmines is the militarily responsible thing to do." That was signed by General Norman Schwarzkopf, hero of the Gulf War; signed by General David Jones, former Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff; signed by General Galvin, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander; signed by General Hollingsworth, who set up our defensive structures for Korea. Fifteen of the nation's most respected retired military leaders openly called on the President to get rid of this weapon. And I got to tell you, you should understand one thing: these guys are the ultimate American patriots. They would do nothing, nothing, to compromise the safety, the integrity and the well being of U.S. fighting forces anywhere in the world. So the fact that they all leaned into this campaign and argued it should settle any concern that there is a real military issue involved here.

The fact is, in Vietnam, landmines were the leading cause of casualties for our own forces. Our peacekeepers through NATO, U.N., it was the leading source of their casualties. U.S. soldiers would be better off if anti-personnel landmines were removed from the face of the earth. But, I went with several of the generals, and got a chance to talk to the president, laid out all the arguments. His opponent back then, Bob Dole, supported us. Elizabeth Dole openly called for the abolition of the weapon. Not a member of Congress stood up and said we needed the weapon. The ICRC, known for its neutrality, was in the campaign, unprecedentedly so, to argue getting rid of it. We've got a crisis out there.

"Mr. President, what more can we do?" Quote: "You can get the joint chiefs off my ass. I can't afford a breach with the joint chiefs." What made that comment remarkable is that standing next to me was the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He said, "Mr. President, that's why I am here. I and the other retired military officers will support you." "I can't afford a breach with the joint chiefs." We talk about democracy, civilian control of the military? The president listened to only one voice, the joint chiefs, which our military guys have made very clear are, institutionally, incapable of going to the commander-in-chief and suggesting that you take weapons out of their arsenal. That's not their job. It's the president's job, as the commander-in-chief, to balance off the ultimate humanitarian consequences with whatever marginal military value is there.

In our meetings over the last seven years with these guys over at the Pentagon, we've closed the door, and we've said, "Hey, what's going on here?" And they've said, flat out, "This has nothing to do with anti-personnel landmines! They're garbage. The point is, we don't want to set a precedent. Because if we let you reach into our arsenal and take out this weapon in large part because of its humanitarian consequences, then other categories of weapons and munitions systems, cluster bombs, etc., would be at risk." And that's where we stand today.

I want to summarize, and just make a couple of very key, simple points. The most significant lesson I have learned, in my adult life, is that things don't happen simply because they are right. You have to get political strength committed to what you are fighting for. And it is a fight. We've had the extraordinary fortune of having now a five-term democratic senator go nuts on this issue and drive it for us. We had the Canadian foreign minister, whom Jody will be talking about in a minute, who basically went out-years of work on the United Nations, on that Convention on Conventional Weapons,-and failed after years in getting it brought together to reconvene and examine it, because the United Nations is a consensus process. Anyone around the table can block the process. It was the Canadian foreign minister who, with great personal courage, said, "The hell with the United Nations. We are going to do something totally different. We are going to set a standard. And we are going to invite anyone who wants to in a year to come and sign this treaty." When he did that, he got pounded; the U.S. went nuts, our allies berated him. But, at the end of the day, a year later, we got it.

So, individual leadership counts. Political strength has got to be connected to the righteousness of your argument. A lot of the people here have been just like you-and it's through the experiences in life that you have a role in determining how much you are going to get-went through the changes that made them advocates, in response to the injustices that they got exposed to. So, each and every one of you can be up here in several years. And don't doubt that, please.

Thank you.

DISCUSSION AMONGST THE PARTICIPANTS

Julian Bond: Thank you a great deal, Mr. Muller. Who, among us, wants to begin? Then I shall. One hundred thirty-five countries signed the treaty; the U.S. not. How can it hope to have any effectiveness when the major power stands aloof?

Bobby Muller: I think the fact that so many countries have signed the treaty really puts pressure on the United States not to stand outside what is clearly the larger community of nations out there. And the dynamic of really having other countries challenge the United States by going forward without it being a mutual deal has been an extraordinary dynamic. However, I think that it is absolutely critical that we continue our efforts and get the United States. I think one of the ironies that I am experiencing is that we had a hell of a year last year. You wind up with a Diana who, through the tragedy of her death, connects this issue with the entire world, really. You get an Axworthy who basically jettisons the existing mechanisms and breaks new ground, and makes a treaty happen. You get the recognition of a Nobel Prize, and a lot of people think, "Hey, you guys did it! Congratulations. Next!"

They don't realize that this was a great step, but, my God, you've still got 80-90 million landmines in the ground, you've still got hundreds of thousands of victims, you have lots of critical countries that are not signatories, and these things have to happen. You are not, realistically speaking, going to universalize the support for this treaty by getting India, Pakistan, China, Russia, if you don't get the United States. I think the United States is sort of a prerequisite in the process to recruit the others. And, we have differences about aspects of this campaign, but I'll tell you, in my view, the ultimate effect of this effort is to stigmatize this weapon in the public's thinking such that anybody who does go ahead and use this weapon is branded a pariah, an outlaw. And that means that it has to be universally condemned. You cannot be looking to stigmatize this weapon if the world's super-power, the United States, which has every alternative capability to meet any possible military requirement going, says, "It's O.K. to continue to use this weapon." Because what they do in doing that is they undercut the moral imperative of the Ottawa Treaty, which says, that this is an inhumane weapon that the world community cannot tolerate.

So, what's been going on puts pressure on the U.S. We have to put pressure on the U.S. Get them, get the others, truly universalize the support, and keep it what it needs to be: a humanitarian concern for people, by doing the de-mining in all of the countries that need to be cleaned up, and providing assistance to the innocent victims around the world.

Julian Bond: President Arias Sánchez, how does this connect with the work that you do, that you are most identified with?

Oscar Arias Sánchez: It is a source of inspiration. It teaches us that we must persevere. If it has taken them such a long time to bring this treaty with a minor, though very dangerous, weapon, how can we be hopeful if we are trying to regulate seven different categories of weapons that are all the weapons you can think? If it has taken them six, seven years, perhaps it might take us 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, but at least it gives us a lot of hope how an individual can make a difference.

Harn Yawnghwe: I know that you are working on this international treaty, but how does it, in a practical sense, affect areas of conflict? I know that a lot of countries haven't signed yet. For example, in Burma, you have the military using it, you have other groups using it as well. How would you approach that program, because it is going to be a big problem for us as well?

Bobby Muller: At the very beginning, somebody said to me, "The fact that you have outlaws is not a reason that you don't want to pass laws." And I think the world is a better place because of the international agreements to prevent the use of poison gas, chemical and biological weapons, and the nuclear limitation agreements that we have, as with the landmines. None of these are going to be the magic wand that's going to make it all better, but they do shift the baseline in the dynamics that underlie a lot of these concerns. Landmines are driven largely by numbers. We were thinking for a long time that we had 110 million landmines. That's what the State Department said a few years ago. They reduced it, and they said, "Ah, maybe there's only 80 million." O.K.? It's a tragedy driven by numbers. If we can effectively stop countries from manufacturing, exporting, and trafficking in the weapon, you are not going to have the situations that we had in the '70s and the '80s, in which major producer countries-which basically are signatories, or have at least acknowledged no further exports-fueling these third-world conflicts by pouring millions and millions of landmines like M & Ms on top of other weapons into these areas. Yeah, there are going to be areas of the world that are slower to bring on than other areas, but it's a process. And I think the consciousness around this stuff, the fact that the major producers are basically out of the business, certainly not selling and transporting, are major steps down the road that we have to continue to travel.

Jody Williams: I certainly agree with everything Bobby has just said. Part of the issue is that this is such a new norm. In one year's time, we achieved the Ban Treaty. It's going to take time to have that establishment of the norm solidified. But just the pressure that's been brought to bear by the political will of so many countries to sign the treaty, so many countries to ratify it-it will become binding international law on March 1 of this coming year, faster than any treaty in history-that pressure has made countries that are still outside the process even take steps. China, for example, which has been one of the most vocal in opposition to a ban-at least the United States, as Bobby mentioned, says they will sign now-we still need to work on them, but China has announced that they have stopped production for export as of 1996. When we were recently at the U.N. with Axworthy and others, talking about this issue, marking the fact that forty countries had ratified so it would enter into force, Foreign Minister Axworthy was able to tell us that he had just had a meeting with the foreign minister of China who, for the first time, announced that they are giving money to the trust fund for de-mining in Bosnia, and they are willing to commit de-mining expertise to train others. So, even though they are not as far as we would like them to be, just the fact that they are responding to the global awareness, I think, is very heartening. Additionally, our own military says that there have been no significant exports of anti-personnel landmines now for over four years. So, I think the norm will be firmly established over time, and just the public pressure and the awareness has already made it increasingly difficult for countries to stay outside what is becoming increasingly accepted behavior. But, in order to avoid the Burmas of tomorrow from using mines, what we really need to do is see the stockpiles destroyed. And part of the need for this treaty to enter into force as soon as possible was because then the various timetables of the treaty start ticking. Countries that have ratified then have four years to destroy their stockpiles. You want the Angolas to sign and ratify and destroy. As they teeter on the brink of civil war again, it would certainly be less horrifying if they couldn't have the stocks of anti-personnel landmines to use in the ground again. Cambodia. Kosovo, where they are using mines now. The faster we get this treaty really moving, the stocks destroyed, the sooner we have the possibility of diminishing the possibility of use in the future. So, it's part of a process, but we've done a lot in a short period of time, and I am sure we will continue.

Dr. Rigoberta Menchú Tum: We have all admired this struggle and have united ourselves with it. As more people join this struggle, it has a bigger effect. I wanted to ask if there is a list of manufacturing companies that make landmines and if this information, this Campaign, is getting to them. Usually, the manufacturer builds the bomb and it builds the thing that will dismantle it as well. It makes money on both ends. Thus I wanted to know more about this.

Bobby Muller: There have been many demonstrations at producers of landmines in this country. Human Rights Watch has put out reports on the producers, which are very detailed and are available if you simply call their offices. And I think putting pressure at all points in the campaign makes as awful lot of sense. The question I was just asked, which I want to address very quickly, is people may not understand what we are talking about in de-mining. And, I have to say, in '92, I went to the Pentagon and I said, "O.K., how do we clean up all these landmines that are out there?" And I was amazed when the Pentagon said "We don't know." I said, "What do you mean, you don't know?" And they said, "We don't know. We don't do that kind of work." And they explained that the only concern they really had was looking at landmines as an obstacle in battle that had to be cut across. You can traverse a minefield in any one of a whole lot of different ways. I'll give you one example. You can fire det-cord-detonation cord-across the minefield, you blow it, and you are able to what they call "breach" the minefield. You may take a casualty, but it's combat, and that's what soldiers are designed, basically, to deal with. All right? The idea of actually lifting landmines out of an area was something that they had never put any energy into doing. And they said, "Go talk to the humanitarians at the State Department." We go over to the State Department and say, "Hey, how do we do this?" And they say, "What the hell are you doing here? That's a weapon. Go deal with the Pentagon." And it is unbelievable but as recently as 1992 we really didn't have any organized concepts of how to go about de-mining. Now we do. There are mechanisms, and more times than not, it is actually somebody with a very sensitive metal detector going over the ground, getting a signal, that digs up the landmine. The problem is that I think one out of every 125 times the metal detector gets a signal is it actually a landmine. All the others times it's a piece of shrapnel, or sometimes even the ferrous content of the soil itself. But the point is: we now know that it can be done. It costs money to put these people in the field, it's slow, and it's dangerous, but it can be done. And countries have committed, pledged, millions of dollars, but the difference between the rhetoric and the reality is a substantial difference, and we gotta hold their feet to the fire to get the bucks actually committed. It's a problem that does have a solution, but it requires a commitment of political will to get the bucks up to get the job done.

Julian Bond: One other thing about something you said a moment ago, about "magic wands." So many people, many of them young, seem to me to be suggesting that if we can't have magic wands that solve these problems [snaps fingers] like that, what's the use? What's the use in these long, protracted-the twenty or thirty years President Arias speaks of-what's the use? What's the use of these battles?

Bobby Muller: Well, you gotta get smart. A good friend of mine is Tom Daschle, who is the Minority Leader in the Senate. And he said to me, "Bobby, last year, you learned how to play the game." He said that you take a very small piece of the action, and you stay focused on it for years. And just keep your focus. And slowly, incrementally, by sticking with it and maintaining a focus, you can get something done. And I really believe that you gotta get into these efforts thinking in terms of, really, decades. When we started this campaign, I gotta say-I said this yesterday-I had no doubt that we would get there. I thought it would take twenty years. I had no expectation that it would catch hold the way it did, but that's part of the play.

One of the things I have learned in Washington is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. And when you get something that you can explain in thirty seconds, you got a lot higher chance of success than something that needs a treatment of five minutes to lay out. And the beauty about landmines is-I found out when we did telemarketing-in the phone banks, guys could get on the phone and in thirty seconds get a commitment for bucks out of somebody on the other end. I said, "This is a good issue." The fact that it was simple, and people could visualize it, and it, in fact, was a tragedy on the scale that it was, helped accelerate the time line. But if you want to do something serious, it's not going to happen, unless it's an extraordinary exception, on a short-time basis. You gotta think, in my book, at least ten years plus.