Jihad Watch News Editor Marisol Seibold has done yeoman work holding the fort while I have been making my way through the Badlands for the last week and a half. I am sorry to be a bit late posting this due to my travels, but it is too important to let pass. From Reuters:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Bush vowed on Tuesday to prevent al Qaeda from setting up a violent, radical Islamic empire based in Iraq, which he said was Osama bin Laden’s ultimate goal.
“We know what the terrorists intend to do because they’ve told us — and we need to take their words seriously,” Bush said in a speech liberally laced with quotes from bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks five years ago which killed around 3,000 people.
[…]
Addressing the Military Officers Association of America, Bush said Islamic radicals would like to obtain nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in order to “blackmail the free world and spread their ideologies of hate.”
“If we retreat from Iraq, if we don’t uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty 50 years from now, history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know why we did not act,” Bush said.
“I’m not going to allow this to happen and no future American president can allow it either,” he said.
Bush quoted extensively from bin Laden’s videotaped messages and writings, comparing him to 20th century dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Lenin and Germany’s Adolf Hitler.
BIN LADEN LETTER
He cited in particular a letter from bin Laden to the former Taliban ruler, Mullah Omar, that coalition forces found in Afghanistan in 2002.
Bin Laden wrote that al Qaeda should launch a media campaign to tell Americans “their government would bring them more losses, in finances and in casualties,” and that they are being sacrificed for big investors, “especially the Jews.”
Bush said al Qaeda’s vision was to create a “unified totalitarian Islamic state that can confront and eventually destroy the free world.”
It is good of him to acknowledge this. It has yet to be established that there is significant, organized, and numerous Islamic opposition to this project. After all, the Iraqi Constitution already establishes Sharia as the highest law of the land. Is that not a step toward this goal?
Bin Laden has declared Iraq “the capital of the caliphate,” said Bush, who has often faced criticism for trying to tie Iraq into the broader “war on terrorism.”
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, the losing presidential candidate in 2004, responded that if Bush had killed bin Laden in late 2001, “he wouldn’t have to quote this barbarian’s words today.”
“Afghanistan is slipping back into chaos, Pakistan is one coup away from becoming a radical Islamic state with nuclear weapons, Iran is closer to a nuclear arsenal, and Iraq has become a recruitment poster for terror,” Kerry said.
Appeasement-minded withdrawal and quixotic democracy planting are both out of focus. Resisting and defeating the jihad should be the goal, and the cornerstone of American strategizing.