Atrios says it’s no secret that the red-faced, spitting motormouth that Chris Matthews plays on TV is different from the real guy. It may be that a small percentage of insiders know that, but I doubt most of his viewers do.
Speaking at Brown University this week, the “Hardball” player told students that the White House’s rationale for invading Iraq was “totally dishonest” and that the Veep “is behind it all. The whole neo-conservative power vortex, it all goes through his office. He has become the chief executive …It’s scary.”
Cheney and the neo-cons saw in George W. Bush “a man who never read any books, who didn’t think too deeply, and they gave him something to think about for the first time in his life,” Matthews said, according to Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Call.
Now why do you suppose that Matthews has conveniently neglected to share this particular view on his show?
This is why they are called mediawhores. It is not just an fun epithet, thrown around to insult them. It is an accurate metaphor for what they do. They sell themselves for access and ratings.
Chris had better buy himself a new teddy, though, because it’s going to take some special attention to smooth over
this unfortunate little revelation that he does what he does for money, not love. His pimp had to bring him back into line.
A White House spokesman tells us Matthews’ analysis is “disrespectful, totally false and irresponsible. Mr. Matthews has lost touch with reality. The President made the decision to go to war using the same facts as the previous administration and the United Nations, which judged Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region.”
But, Bush loves you Chris, he really does. Now, get back out there and sell your ass.
Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.
The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president’s 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.
…
Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries.
Except, in the case of Iraq, there was no urgent need to start the war in the first place and everybody knows it. If getting rid of the evil Saddam was the predominant reason for the war, as the current spin would have it, then the Iraqi people surely could have held out for a couple of months so that we could follow the law in awarding billions of dollars in contracts. There really was no rush, now was there?
There are a good many reasons why Bush and his think tank intellectual dreamers got us into this thing, from visions of Empire to revenge to breaking OPEC to kicking ass. But, this one really helps explain the ridiculous hurry. The corporations didn’t get their tax cuts in the first term, and if Karl wanted to raise the obscene amount of money it’s going to take to brainwash the public into believing that Lil Cap’n T-Ball isn’t as incompetent as he looks, he had to give these guys a taste.
There was no threat, imminent or otherwise, but we rushed into war destroying every international relationship that stood in our way and coincidentally, had to hand out 8 billion dollars worth of no bid contracts to George W. Bush’s top political contributors — because there was no time to fill out the paperwork.
Avedon Carol writes about liberal internationalists’ unwillingness to recognize that continuing to support Bush’s Iraq policy is actually harming the cause of Iraqi freedom. Even if you believe that they support the same goals, it is clear that they are untrustworthy and incompetent. Knee jerk anti-Saddam rhetoric aside, it’s becoming possible that the average Iraqi is beginning to wonder if he hasn’t been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire.
I don’t get it. It reminds me of those stories about the guy who uncorks the jinni and you know whatever the guy wishes for is going to be delivered in such a way that it’s the last thing he wants, but he wishes for it anyway. Like Godfrey Cambridge saying, “I wanna make ’em laugh,” and instead of turning into a great comedian it’s just that people laugh no matter what he says or does. So then he wants to be a serious actor and says, “I wanna make ’em cry,” and he dies in a traffic accident and they all cry. What you want is for Iraq to be a free democracy, and you say, “I wanna invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam.” And you don’t get the democracy or the freedom or any of that, you just get the invasion and Saddam out of power because that’s all you wished for. So now you wish for – what? For the Democrats to all fall in line and give George Bush whatever money he wants that he claims will go to the restoration of Iraq? Come on, you know you can’t just write this guy blank checks. If you’re not prepared to nail down those wishes in unmistakable terms so that what you want to happen will actually happen, maybe you just better stop making wishes.
I think that the Democrats have an excellent campaign argument to make here. When some FauxNews whore like Carl Cameron asks the “what would you do about Iraq,” the answer is really quite simple.
They should say that the central Iraq policy problem is George W. Bush. He can’t get essential international support because after the way he handled the run up to the war, with the insults and the lies, the rest of the world doesn’t trust him. He can’t run the occupation because he refused to listen to those, even in his own administration, who have experience in post war occupation and planned accordingly. He followed bad advice.
To solve the emerging problems in Iraq immediately, George W. Bush needs to fire his foreign policy advisors, every one of them, and go on a world tour designed to reestablish trust in America’s motives and intentions. He needs to repudiate the Bush Doctrine, which has fueled the notion that the US believes it has the sole power to launch preventive wars and resolves to do so whenever it chooses, based upon modern intelligence techniques that we have just proven are completely unreliable.
If he refuses to do those two things, the only answer is to replace George W. Bush. That one act alone will completely change the international dynamic and immediately increase the liklihood of a renewed international effort in Iraq with both financial and military support. The world doesn’t mistrust the United States, it mistrusts George W. Bush.
We have problem in Iraq because George W. Bush arrogantly and short-sightedly alienated the rest of the world. Unless George W. Bush personally rectifies that situation immediately, the only solution is to replace George W. Bush.
He thinks the world revolves around him and he’s right.
Update: Sometimes I think I’m channelling others and don’t even know it. Tristero discusses this same thing and links to Liberal Oasis who writes about it today as well. The consensus is that the answer to the question of what to do about Iraq is get rid of GWB so that America is trusted again by other countries and they will be willing to help us out of this mess that Bush and his cronies created.
“I think it is outrageous. He blamed the sailors for that and it is something — an event — that his advance team staged. I guess that next thing we are going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier.”
Wes, it’s shimmy into a skintight jumpsuit and prance around an aircraft carrier like a Chippendales dancer.”
Ok. I guess you have to be a little bit more dignified. Still, great minds do think alike, eh?
So, self-described stalker Donald Luskin has his lawyer threaten to sue Atrios (and not incidentally out him) because Atrios also used the word “stalker” in his blog post about Luskin’s article “Face To Face With Evil” — in which Luskin describes his stalking of Paul Krugman.
Irony may be dead, but Luskin et al are energetically committing necrophilia on the corpse. Oy.
Apparently, Donald Luskin (who in my opinion, is showing some signs of serious mental illness) believes that it is acceptable for him to call Paul Krugman “evil” but it is not acceptable for Atrios to call Luskin a “stalker,”a phrase Luskin used to describe himself. Oh, and let’s not forget that Don was very offended, hurt and upset by the anonymous creepy people who said mean things about him in Atrios’ comments section. It’s just too much!
When, exactly, did the right wing become such a bunch of lame-assed pussies, anyway? These are the big, bad motherfuckers who are going to run the world? If this is any indication of how they take a punch, Jenna Bush had better get used to wearing a burka, because Osama bin Laden is going to be sitting in the White House within the next decade.
The whining, the crying, the wringing of the hands about “political hate speech,” the law suits over hurt feelings, running away from interviews with a 5’2″ woman because she was “aggressive,” snivelling about “leftist homophobia” for making fun of the simpering drooling over Bush’s “masculinity” — it’s all so pathetic.
We’ve got nothing to worry about folks. Limbaugh’s in rehab because he couldn’t take the pain and had to hide his illegal “little blue babies” under the bed so his meanie of a wife wouldn’t get all mad at him, Bennett spent years furtively cowering behind the “Beverly Hillbillies” video poker machine at the Mirage so that nobody would recognize him, Coulter’s having little temper tantrums on national TV because she’s not being “treated fairly,” and Junior travels with his own special pillow and can’t even give up his favowit, widdle butterscotch candies for longer than an hour and a half.
I will defend my record at the appropriate time, and look forward to it. I’ll say that the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership, and America is more secure. And that will be the — that will be how I’ll begin describing our foreign policy.
shhhh. Don’t tell the Democrats.
And by the way, everything in the whole wide world is about me, me, me, nothing but me.
You know, I was struck by the fact when I was in Japan recently that my relations with Prime Minister Koizumi are very close and personal. And I was thinking about what would happen if, in a post-World War II era, we hadn’t won the peace, as well as the war. I mean, would I have had the same relationship with Mr. Koizumi? Would I be able to work closely on crucial relations? I doubt it. I doubt it.
That wudda been so sad cuz whenever he went tah Japan on a president trip he woodn’t o’ had his friend, cuz ther woodn’t o’ been the peace. Tank gunness we wun it or he wudda missed his special friend, ‘n then he wudda been all alone in Japan.
Here’s some more of that good ole 60’s deja vu vu. Remember that golden oldie, “Destroy The Village In Order To Save It?”
Here’s the Hip Hop update by Grand Master Chickenhawk:
“Honestly, it’s a little tougher than I thought it was going to be,” Lott said. In a sign of frustration, he offered an unorthodox military solution: “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You’re dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out.”
What happened to “give peace a chance,” my brotha?
Four years ago, NATO’s military commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, faced a similar barrage of pessimism from the press and from members of Congress hostile to President Clinton’s war in Kosovo. The skeptics argued that our adversary, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, had proven to be too mentally strong for us and that we should back off. Clark turned that argument on its head: By refusing to let Milosevic break our will, we would break his. Milosevic “may have thought that some countries would be afraid of his bluster and intimidation,” said Clark. “He was wrong. … He thought that taking prisoners and mistreating them and humiliating them publicly would weaken our resolve. Wrong again. … We’re winning, Milosevic is losing, and he knows it.”
I never believed Bush’s claim that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was essential to the war on terror. I’m angry that Bush continues to invoke that bogus rationale for the invasion. But the assassinations and indiscriminate bombings we’re witnessing in post-Saddam Iraq really are part of the war on terror. We can’t crumple under this pressure any more than we could have crumpled four years ago in the showdown with Milosevic. Bush is right, just as Clark was right: War is a contest of wills.
That’s why it’s so troubling today to see Clark join in the same self-fulfilling wave of determined pessimism and obstruction he battled four years ago. “This president didn’t know how he wanted [the Iraq war] to end. He doesn’t know what he’s doing today,” Clark charged in Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate. “I would not have voted [for the] $87 billion. … The best form of welfare for the troops is a winning strategy. And I think we ought to call on our commander in chief to produce it. And I think he ought to produce it before he gets one additional penny for that war.”
I don’t know whether we’ll win the postwar if Congress approves the money Bush asked for. But I know we’ll lose it if Congress doesn’t. That’s what happens when a nation at war starts to think like the Wes Clark of 2003. Just ask the Wes Clark of 1999.
The analogy might be applicable if:
a) cruel dictator Saddam (like Milosevic) was still in power at the time the comments were made or
b) we were actually “winning the postwar” whatever that means or
c) the bombings and assassinations were proven to be part of the WOT.
The fact is that we already removed the terrible dictator and are now engaged in a guerilla war against Gawd knows who and we don’t have any idea if it has fuck-all to do with the so-called war on terrorism or not. It’s entirely possible that the people who are blowing up Americans in Iraq are Iraqis who (not completely unreasonably) see us as an enemy — not because of Holy Jihad, but because we invaded their country, killed a bunch of people and look like we’re going to be staying around and running things for some time to come. Just because Arabs are doing the killing doesn’t automatically mean that it’s Islamic terrorism. And, even if it is, since there wasn’t any Islamic terrorism in Iraq until we invaded you’d have to conclude that we brought terrorism to the Iraqis.
But sadly I think that Sir Evenhand might be making the braindead point that any assassinations and bombings are part of the War On Terror, in which case we have always been at War With Oceania … er, Terror. Bombings and assassinations were not invented Osama bin Laden. Why, now that I think about it, even the good ole US of A is a terrorist nation by that definition.
Any comparison between what Wes Clark said during major combat operations in Kosovo as the commanding general and what he’s saying now after 6 months of complete chaos in post war Iraq is absurd. You might as well say that if you ever defended any war then you must defend all wars because other than the fact that a bunch of guys in uniform were conducting some kind of military operations in a foreign land, the two situations are completely different.
Furthermore, Clark, unlike patriots Tom DeLay and Trent Lott during Kosovo, isn’t saying that America should just up and leave in the middle of combat. He’s criticizing the president for not having a plan, which is true, not having a firm attainable goal, also true, and for not producing a winning strategy, which is indisputable. He contends that the only way to get these things is to hold up the money — the only power the congress has when it comes to foreign policy. If Clark had fucked up the Kosovo campaign as badly as this, you can believe that the Republican congress would have flayed both him and Clinton like a couple of dead fish.
Oh wait. They did. Only they did it in the midst of combat operations that proved to be tremendously successful within mere weeks, producing not one American combat death, and the lessons from which were thrown into the shredder when the big swinging Dick Cheneys came into office.
Saleton dutifully reported this at the time and now we see that he is doing his usual church lady superior dance by trying to stretch the Republicans’ laughably inept and silly criticisms of the Kosovo military campaign as equivalent to the ongoing worldwide condemnation of the Bush administration’s inept handling of the occupation of Iraq and the lies that brought us there.
He’s saying that Clark’s stating he wouldn’t authorize 87 billion dollars more for an occupation that was billed as cost free and which the president seems to be running by the seat of his pants, without any clear strategy is the same thing as these comments made by leading Republicans during combat operations in Kosovo. (Interestingly, what they wrongly said about Kosovo has actually come to pass in Iraq:)
“Once the bombing commenced, I think then [Slobodan] Milosevic unleashed his forces, and then that’s when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really started,” Nickles said at a news conference after appearing on Meet the Press. “The administration’s campaign has been a disaster. … [It] escalated a guerrilla warfare into a real war, and the real losers are the Kosovars and innocent civilians.”
Nickles questioned the propriety of “NATO’s objectives,” calling its goal of “access to all of Serbia … ludicrous.” DeLay, meanwhile, voted not only against last week’s House resolution authorizing Clinton to conduct the air war–which failed on a tie vote–but also in favor of legislation “directing the president … to remove U.S. Armed Forces from their positions in connection with the present operations against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
“I don’t know that Milosevic will ever raise a white flag,” warned Nickles. DeLay agreed: “He’s stronger in Kosovo now than he was before the bombing. … The Serbian people are rallying around him like never before. He’s much stronger with his allies, Russians and others.” Clinton “has no plan for the end” and “recognizes that Milosevic will still be in power,” added DeLay.
Unless Clinton finds “a way to get the bombing stopped” and to “get Milosevic to pull back his troops” voluntarily, NATO faces “a quagmire … a long, protracted, bloody war,” warned Lott. Clinton “only has two choices,” said DeLay–to “occupy Yugoslavia and take Milosevic out” or “to negotiate some sort of diplomatic end, diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed policy.
Cohen said it was “highly unlikely” that Clinton would meet with Milosevic in response to Yugoslavia’s release of the three captured American soldiers over the weekend, since the Serbs were continuing their atrocities and weren’t offering to meet NATO’s conditions. DeLay called this refusal “really disappointing” and a failure of “leadership. … The president ought to open up negotiations and come to some sort of diplomatic end.” Lott implored Clinton to “give peace a chance” and, comparing the war with the recent Colorado high-school shootings, urged him to resolve the Kosovo conflict with “words, not weapons.”
And here’s my favorite:
And DeLay suggested that the United States should pull out unilaterally: “When Ronald Reagan saw that he had made a mistake putting our soldiers in Lebanon … he admitted the mistake, and he withdrew from Lebanon.”
Saleton says, “Bush is right, just as Clark was right: War is a contest of wills.”
Tell it to the 50,000 plus Americans who died in Vietnam and then ask them if that “contest of wills” made any damned difference. Not all wars are the same and this so-called “War On Terror” isn’t a war in any conventional sense, isn’t going to be won by conventional means and can’t be compared with conventional battles that were conventionally won.
Anybody who cannot see the difference between the success of the war in Kosovo (and the disingenuousness of the Republican “peaceniks” who opposed it) and this quagmire we’ve gotten ourselves into in Iraq, much less the ephemeral War On Terror is, as I wrote, either stupid or drunk.
A number of readers have written to me today asking if I’m familiar with George Lakoff, whom Atrios points to in this interesting interview, because I discuss this kind of thing quite a bit here on Hullabaloo. As these guys guessed, I’ve read much of his work and have been very influenced by it. He is completely correct, in my view, about the immense power of framing issues with language and image and his ideas about candidates as “identities” is right on the money.
If I have a beef with Lakoff it’s that the one frame he’s most known for — the Republican “strict father” and the Democrat “nurturing parent” — is one of the most unfortunate metaphors for the progressive cause that I can imagine.
It’s not that he’s wrong in his analysis, it’s that he’s used the wrong terms to frame it. (Yep. You heard me. I hereby accept the 2003 Shameless Intellectual Arrogance Award. Thank you very much.)
I don’t think it’s a very good frame to begin with because it isn’t honest. Let’s not pretend that the real frame isn’t “strict father” vs “nurturing mother.” The frame doesn’t really make sense otherwise. And, rightly or wrongly, this frame makes the tension gender based, and in doing so it defines progressive leadership as female leadership, something that is an indistinct and still evolving archetypal image. This puts progressives at a disadvantage because people don’t immediately associate women with public leadership just yet. That will, of course, come to pass in the not too distant future (I hope.) But framing isn’t a matter for wish fulfillment. To work, it must be immediately recognizable. The fact that Lakoff didn’t use the obvious “father-mother” construction indicates to me that knew that this was a problem.
I do not mean to condemn him completely for the fact that his framework is being used to give Republicans an advantage. He has never suggested that Democrats use this as a campaign slogan or even a public identity and yet I read people all the time who think that this “nurturing parent/mother” image is a winning one for the Democrats. I think that it informs a lot of thinking about what issues on which the Democrats should run even when the political environment makes those issues far less salient than others, regardless of what polls say people care about. And, just because we are the “nurturing parent” party does not mean that the way to win elections is to pretend that the only problems worth addressing are those that can be solved with nurturing — or that nurturing can solve every problem.
Lakoff says that the progressive worldview is:
“Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values.”
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline — physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.
I believe that this is all true. But, I don’t like the “strict” and “nurturing” characterizations any more than I like the “Father” and ”Mother” dichotomy.
If it is necessary to frame the political divide in family terms, I might have done it as “rigid parents” vs. “conscientious parents.” The analysis remains the same, but the words don’t imply character traits that people automatically associate with strong vs weak leadership, but rather they connote negative vs positive leadership.
The word “strict” does imply discipline but self-discipline is valued by most people, even if cruel methods to attain it are not. And the word strict does not, as Lakoff seems to say, necessarily correlate to abuse and heartlessness in most people’s minds. “Rigid” on the other hand, implies narrow mindedness and inability to admit error along with a severe, uncompromising temperment.
The word “nurturing” does exactly what Lakoff admonishes the Democrats to stop doing, which is play into the GOP framework. The right has been framing the left and right for many years as the “nanny state” vs “individual freedom.” “Nurturing parent” and “nanny state” are too closely related. “Conscientious”, however, encompasses all the empathetic qualities that Lakoff ascribes to the left, but also implies a willingness to react with strength where necessary. A conscientious parent responds to hostile threats as well as well as cries for help.
Both traits are equally masculine and feminine, so there is no archetypal leadership image associated with them.
From a tactical communications standpoint, it is very important for the left to acknowledge that Lakoff is telling us that our current method of framing ourselves is as flawed as the way the other side frames us. (Indeed, I’ve just argued that the master himself has made a major error.) But, even if I agreed with his framework, it would still not be useful to merely parrot it and assume that it is a good tactical framework merely because Lakoff himself is a progressive. The point of all this is to frame issues in such a way as to persuade the undecideds and apathetic and at least some members of the opposition to agree with our side of the argument. That means we have to stop preaching to the choir all the time.
And framing alone is not enough. We also have to take into account certain realities about how people arrive at political decisions these days. It’s my observation that they rely on simplistic symbolism and image more than they have in the past, mostly because of the pervasiveness of the shallow celebrity culture and television’s position as the epicenter of the American community. (I’ll elaborate on that in a later post.)
As Lakoff says in the article:
In the strict father model, the big thing is discipline and moral authority, and punishment for those who do something wrong. That comes out very clearly in the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policy. With Schwarzenegger, it’s in his movies: most of the characters that he plays exemplify that moral system. He didn’t have to say a word! He just had to stand up there, and he represents Mr. Discipline. He knows what’s right and wrong, and he’s going to take it to the people. He’s not going to ask permission, or have a discussion, he’s going to do what needs to be done, using force and authority. His very persona represents what conservatives are about.
I think this is right on the money. Schwarzenegger’s campaign rested solely on his scripted action-hero persona. In fact, this may be the first election in which all pretense of substance was completely abandoned in favor of purely manufactured Hollywood symbolism. The “crisis” that precipitated the recall wasn’t real, the ensuing voter “anger” wasn’t real and the winning candidate wasn’t real. The entire narrative was scripted as a loose form reality TV show in which the drama was pushed and prodded by the “producers” even though the outcome wasn’t preordained. It was “real” in the same way that “Survivor” is real.
As Lakoff rightly points out, this stuff is important and the Democrats are just not getting with the program. The other side is doing it with a tremendous amount of sophistication and almost unlimited financial backing. California is the most populated state in the nation and if it can happen here, a Democratic state, it can happen nationally. In fact, in many ways, election 2000 was an early version.
Meanwhile, many on our side seem to believe that there is something distasteful about framing issues and using symbolism and metaphor to win elections as if being unable to govern honestly is the natural consequence of using these communication techniques. This is wrong.
It is only a method to get our ideas across and make the American public see our candidates in a way they are comfortable with. There is no reason that politicians must be vapid in order that their campaigns and issues are communicated through positive framing, metaphor and symbolism. It’s just that the Republicans have such geeky, unpleasant politicians and policies that they have no choice but to pick people like manufactured movie stars or dynastic restoration figures as their symbols and then destroy the opposition with ruthless character assassination.
Here’s a little example of framing that worked for the Democrats. As much as any position on issues or rhetorical brilliance, Bill Clinton, for all of his wonkish intellect, won in 1992 mostly because he symbolized the changing of the guard from the WWII generation to the baby boom. The cold war was over; the boomers were middle aged and ready to take power. There were two important symbolic moments in that campaign, both of which Clinton seemed to instinctively grasp and where his natural gifts as a politician served him well.
The first was when he played “Heartbreak Hotel” on the sax with his shades on, an unprecedented act of post-modern presidential media coolness. The other was showing the footage at the convention of John F. Kennedy shaking a 17 year old Bill Clinton’s hand – an almost literal passing of the torch from the guy who inspired the baby boomers with an inaugural speech in which he said “the torch has been passed to a new generation.” It was brilliant. Clinton understood his historical moment and framed that election as Young vs Old, Change vs Stasis and he used his own quintessential baby boomer narrative (and all that that entailed, good and bad) to make that case.
The task for Democrats in 2004 is to recognize this historical moment and muster all the tools at our disposal to frame this election in our favor and nominate the most qualified candidate whose image and personal narrative best serves as a metaphor for the current zeitgeist.
I’d be very interested in hearing any ideas out there as to how people think their preferred candidate and this election generally should be framed, and what images, symbols and metaphors might be used to advance our cause. (I’m interested in long term solutions but since I believe that this election is critical, I think it’s important to focus on that first.)
“The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice.”—Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003