"Victory will come when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their citizens on their own, and when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks against our nation." --Bush speech today
Iraq was never a safe haven for terrorists before Bush and Cheney invited them to attack our soldiers there.
Cheney in a speech before the Heritage Foundation:
"We are fighting this evil in Iraq so that we do not have to fight it in our own cities." "There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is 'bring them on'," Bush told reporters in the White House Roosevelt Room at the beginning of the war.
They practically invited them to join the battle there and ally with the forces that threatened our soldiers daily.
Bush also mentioned Zarqawi, as if to suggest that someone who is aligned with al-qaeda was in Iraq before the invasion, and that it meant that Saddam was harboring him or letting al-qaeda train in Iraq.
"Tal Afar sits just 35 miles from the Syrian border." Bush said today.
"It was a strategic location for al Qaeda and their leader, Zarqawi." Zarqawi was in Iraq before the invasion, but he was protected from Saddam's forces by the U.S. and our no-fly zone.
NBC report from 2004:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/"In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey."
and, from Juan Cole:
http://www.juancole.com/2004/02/safire-gets-it-wrong-zarqawi-william.html"Ansar al-Islam (who harbored Zarqawi) was a small, mainly Kurdish little group
operating under the protection of the US no-fly zone. Its radical Islamism would not have been allowed in Baath-controlled territory. Even the Iraqi Islamic Party (Muslim Brotherhood) was banned by Saddam, and it was not nearly as radical. Although the US did not sponsor Ansar al-Islam, it was the no-fly zone that made it possible. It was not "Iraq" that harbored the group, but the US no-fly zone."
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