Cheney, Bush Tout Gains in Terror War

In speeches, briefings, interviews and an online chat, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others used the events surrounding this week's handover of political autonomy in Iraq to rebuild their case that Iraq is experiencing a "historic transformation" and Americans are safer as a result.

Returning to the main justification for the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in an interview released by the Pentagon, said forbidden chemical weapons were found in Iraq in recent days. Rumsfeld said the Polish defense minister told him this week "that his troops in Iraq had recently come across -- I've forgotten the number, but something like 16 or 17 -- warheads that contained sarin and mustard gas."

I highly recommend reading Cheney's speech about the success in the War on Terror, and the link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Remarks by the Vice President at the D-Day Museum

Here is just an excerpt:

"The danger that faces free nations today requires strength, resolve, and moral clarity. And we are fortunate to have in President George W. Bush a leader to fit for these times. (Applause.) Under his leadership, our nation has made dramatic progress in the war on terror. Consider for a moment how matters stood at the time when President Bush was sworn into office on January 20th, 2001.

Terrorists were on the offensive around the world, emboldened by many years of unanswered attacks. Repeatedly, they had struck America with little cost or consequence. Terrorists tried to bring down the World Trade Center for the first time in 1993; they attacked us at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; they blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in 1998; and they attacked the USS. Cole, in 2000. In none of these cases, did the United States respond very forcefully.

Our enemies took lessons from this experience. They concluded that our country was soft. They grew to believe that if they hit us hard enough, if they inflicted sufficient casualties, the United States could be forced to retreat and withdraw - - as we did after attacks against us in Lebanon in 1983, and Somalia in 1993. So they set in motion plans for an attack of tremendous magnitude, in the form of coordinated hijackings of American passenger jets on September 11th, 2001. As President Bush and I were sworn in, planning for this attack was well underway. Hijackers had been recruited, funds raised, training commenced -- and some of the 9/11 hijackers were already in the United States.

When we took office, Saddam Hussein was providing financial rewards to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, and safe haven and support for terrorists and terror groups such as Abu Nidal, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Abu Abbas, the mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Saddam's regime also had long established ties with al Qaeda. These ties included senior-level contacts going back a decade. In the early 1990s, Saddam had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train al Qaeda in bomb-making and document forgery. After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Iraq gave sanctuary to one of the bombers, Abdul Rahman Yasin. Later, senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took sanctuary in Baghdad after coalition forces drove him out of Afghanistan. From the Iraqi capital in 2002, Zarqawi -- along with some two dozen associates, al Qaeda members, and affiliates -- ran a poisons camp in northern Iraq, which became a safe haven for Ansar al-Islam as well as al Qaeda terrorists fleeing our coalition in Afghanistan. The Iraqi regime refused to turn over Zarqawi even when twice being provided with detailed information on his presence in Baghdad.

Not only was Saddam providing support and sanctuary for terrorists - as we took office, he was entering his 10th year of defying United Nations demands that he disarm and prove to the world that he had done so. In 1998, U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq because the regime had made it impossible for them to do their work. Saddam had failed to account for his weapons of mass destruction -- weapons he had used against his neighbors and against his own people.

"Americans can be proud of all of these achievements not only because we have removed threats, but also because we have brought freedom to others. By liberating the oppressed in a troubled region, and by helping nations build democratic institutions, we have served the highest ideals of our own country, and greatly enhanced the long-term security of America and our friends."

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