at the Heritage Foundation in Washington,
Monday, June 1, 2009.
The following is the prepared text of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s June 1, 2009 speech at the United States Navy Memorial:
Thank you, Senator Talent, for your very kind introduction. Ed, it is always a pleasure to be with my many friends at the Heritage Foundation, and it’s an honor to give the first of the series of speeches Heritage will sponsor as part of its Protect America Month.
I owe Heritage a great debt of gratitude. When I served as governor, I drew extensively on the research and thinking of this Foundation. Your scholarship and counsel were invaluable as we dealt with our budget crisis, with marriage and taxation and especially in the case of health care. Our program to extend private health insurance to all citizens of Massachusetts has resulted in 440,000 people who were uninsured now having coverage. We proved that government doesn’t have to get in the health insurance business to get people insured. The President and leadership of Congress haven’t learned that lesson yet, which is why we’re going to need the influence of Heritage more than ever in the great health care debate to come.
It is honor to be here at the United States Navy Memorial. It’s humbling to be reminded, in the words of America the Beautiful, of “heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.” Our liberty and security have come at a great price. We can never repay those who died for us, but we can honor their sacrifice by defending freedom and extending its frontiers across the world.
More than 180,000 of our people in uniform are still deployed to theaters of war. And any discussion of America’s national security has to begin with those wars, and the absolute necessity of winning them. The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t receive as much attention as in years past. It wasn’t long ago that most politicians and pundits had pretty much decided Iraq was a lost cause. But our former president was undeterred, and instead of retreating he moved forward with a surge of operations. The astonishing success of our soldiers has silenced the critics. And most importantly, it has preserved freedom for millions of people, denied Jihadists a base from which they could finance and launch attacks, and eliminated the threat Iraq represented to the region. Events have proven the critics wrong, and the coming victory in Iraq will be to the lasting credit of the American servicemen and women who have fought in the finest tradition of the American military.
Just a few days from now, we will mark the 65th anniversary of D-Day.
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