| Page 2 of 2 < |
Bush Blames Iraq Violence on Al-Qaeda
|
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Bush rarely brings up Vietnam analogies, but on Wednesday he offered a comparison: "The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland," he said. "The enemy in Iraq does."
Outside intelligence and terrorism experts described Bush's speech as a self-serving release of old and known information.
"We now have several thousand al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, and they are there because of that invasion," said Daniel Benjamin, a Brookings Institution scholar and a Clinton White House counterterrorism official. He called the speech a "fairly desperate effort to build some support for the mission in Iraq."
The U.S. intelligence community has long believed bin Laden and Zarqawi have wanted to export violence from Iraq, but after a Zarqawi-led bombing in Amman in 2005, there have been no more attacks. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi resisted direction from bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri. White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Fragos Townsend said that while the Department of Homeland Security issued a classified alert in 2005 containing some of the information released this week, Bush had never publicly acknowledged the information. "This one gives you a much greater breadth of detail than we knew at the time," she said.
At the March 3, 2005, ceremony for Michael Chertoff's swearing-in as homeland security secretary, Bush spoke of bin Laden urging "Zarqawi to form a group to conduct attacks outside Iraq, including here in the United States."
Townsend and other officials said the information can now be released because Zarqawi and Rabia have been killed and Abu Faraj has been captured, and the sources and methods involved in the collection of the intelligence could no longer be compromised. Townsend said it takes time to exhaust all leads before such intelligence could be released and "frankly, if political advantage was the name of the game, we would have gotten it a lot sooner."
Townsend said that while there were apparent tensions between Zarqawi and al-Qaeda's leadership, "they were of like minds in using Iraq as a safe haven to plan attacks against America."
Staff writer Walter Pincus and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report from Washington.
