Something he should have been doing aon a much more regular basis. The Democrats and their attacks make them the darlings of the MSM, and that plus the sheer volume of their critical statements allow them to rule the airways. Hopefully we get more of this out of Dubya:
TOBYHANNA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - President George W. Bush charged on Friday that Democratic critics of the Iraq war were trying to rewrite history by accusing the White House of manipulating intelligence to gain support for the war.
Bush, in a Veterans Day speech at an Army depot, fired back at Democrats who have been escalating accusations that Bush misused intelligence to justify an increasingly unpopular war.
Bush said he respected his opponents' right to disagree with him about the decision to go to war against Iraq and that as president he accepted responsibility for what has taken place there under his watch.
But, he added, "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."
"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgment related to Iraq's weapons programs," Bush said.
Bush also opened fire at one critic in particular, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, whom Bush defeated in the presidential election a year ago.
He quoted from Kerry's 2002 Senate speech in supporting the use of force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein, based on charges that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found.
Kerry, Bush said, backed the president "because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security." |
Don't forget Norman Podhoretz recent article if you need to brush up on your facts for defending the war in Iraq against pacifist idiots.
UPDATE: Web Roundup:
SayAnything is tired of the MSM's bias against Dubya and that he even needs to defend his position.
The Unalienable Right agrees that it's about friggin' time Dubya got out their to defend the war. Stop the ACLU reinforces the point that the Democrats agreed with the intelligence at the time. Remember that the data has been validated by several intelligence commitees since the beginning of the Iraq war.
And or course Michelle Malkin is all over it as well.
UPDATE 2: Michael Ledeen out does himself this time with a fantastic piece that will hopefully shed some light on this "Niger yellowcake Wilson Plame Italian forged" documents issue from nearly 3 years ago so that hopefully we can put this issue to rest once and for all. And he uses a bit of comedy to boot...
JJA: The French connection is right. Rocco Martino wasn't working for the Italians at all. He had, in the past, but they'd ditched him, and in this little caper he was paid by French intelligence. He got them the contact inside the Nigerien embassy in Rome, and he peddled them all around, to the Brits, to our government, even to CBS News. He swears he didn't forge them. Nobody seems to know who forged them.
ML: And your question is?
JJA: My question is whether the French were running one of their little disinformation stings on the United States.
ML: Well the moonbat Lefties — from Italy to the U.S., often working in tandem — have been saying for months that it was an Italian forgery designed to help President Bush justify the invasion of Iraq, and secondarily to curry favor in Washington for Berlusconi.
JJA: No way. I spent a lot of time in Italy, and believe me if they had decided to forge documents, they'd have fooled most of the world. Instead, the people at the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency figured it out in a day. No, if the documents were forged badly, it's because whoever did it, wanted them to be seen to be forgeries.
ML: Huh? What sense does that make?
JJA: Think like a counterintelligence analyst for once. It's an old-fashioned sting operation. You're Jacques Chirac, okay? You want to embarrass the Americans and protect your buddy Saddam Hussein, right? The Americans are running around trying to find evidence of a covert Iraqi nuclear program. So, first you feed them some crappy information along those lines, hoping that they'll buy it, and then you arrange — through Rocco in Italy — to have these documents surface. The documents "confirm" the disinformation and of course also what the Americans want to believe anyway. The Americans launch their accusations, then it turns out that the documents are forgeries, and bad forgeries at that, and so the Americans look like idiots and the causus belli disappears. In one move, you've helped your friend Saddam and hurt the Americans. Terrific. Chapeau, and all that.
ML: But it didn't stop the war, did it?
JJA: No, and it wasn't originally designed to stop Bush. It was designed to stop Clinton.
ML: You're kidding, the documents surfaced in the fall of 2002, just a few months before Bush's State of the Union speech.
JJA: True, and I'll get to that in a second. But the documents were forged earlier, almost certainly by 2000. |
I'm going to leave you hanging with that bit. Please, please, please go read the rest of the article. There's just too much good stuff there to pick one bit.
UPDATE 3: You can find a transcript of Dubya's speech at the Guardian. Here are some key segments:
Defeating the militant network's difficult because it thrives like a parasite on the suffering and frustration of others. The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution.
They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical mosques as pawns of terror. And they exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power. Instead of attending faraway training camps, recruits can now access online training libraries to learn how to build a roadside bomb or fire a rocket-propelled grenade.
And this further spreads the threat of violence even within peaceful democratic societies.
The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They've been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of convenience, like Iran and Syria, that share the goal of hurting America and modern Muslim governments and use terrorist propaganda to blame their own failures on the West, on America and on the Jews.[...]
Some have also argued that extremists have been strengthened by our actions in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.
I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11, 2001.
The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue. And it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.
The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 150 Russian school children in Beslan.
Over the years, these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence: the Israeli presence on the West Bank, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, the defeat of the Taliban, or the crusades of a thousand years ago.
In fact, we are not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. |
Good stuff. Read the whole thing. |
