Bush On The Air: A Visit To Anbar Province
September 8, 2007, 3:52pm
From the weekly radio address given by President Bush after his trip to Iraq:
Earlier this week, I traveled to Iraq’s Anbar province to visit our troops and see with my own eyes the remarkable changes they are making possible. … Last year at this time, Anbar was all over the news. Newspapers at the time cited a leaked intelligence report that was pessimistic about our prospects there. … But local citizens soon saw what life under al Qaeda meant for them. The terrorists brutalized the people of Anbar and killed those who opposed their dark ideology. So the tribal sheiks of Anbar came together to fight al Qaeda. They asked for support from the Coalition and the Iraqi government, and we responded.
Together we have driven al Qaeda out of strongholds in Anbar. The level of violence is down. Local governments are meeting again. Young Sunnis are joining the police and army. And normal life is returning. The people of Anbar have seen that standing up to the terrorists and extremists leads to a better life. And Anbar has shown that improving security is the first step toward achieving economic progress and political reconciliation.
Listen to the rest:
In the Democratic radio address, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called attention to this week’s sixth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks and then scolded Bush for not finishing “the job of destroying al Qaeda” and then for “misleading us into an ill-planned war in Iraq.”
This week, President Bush will send General Petraeus to Congress to report on the war — but before the report arrives in Congress, it will pass through the White House spin machine, where facts are often ignored or twisted, and intelligence is cherry-picked,” Reid said. He added that the report presents a yet another chance to re-evaluate Bush’s flawed Iraq policy and shift the focus to “fighting a real, effective war on terrorism.
“If President Bush again refuses to do so, it will be up to the Congress to show him the way – and that is exactly what Democrats intend to do.”
Categories: Nevada, Iraq, White House, Harry Reid, Weekly Radio Address
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