Bush responds to John Kerry's unfounded Iraq charges

Via NRO

From the President's speech in Lancaster, PA:

“After repeatedly calling Iraq the ‘wrong war,’ and a ‘diversion,’ Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place, full of dangerous weapons. The Senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of the campaign, but after all that’s why we’re there. Iraq was a dangerous place run by a dangerous tyrant who had a lot of weapons. We have seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, and more than — thousands of different sites, and we’re continuing to round up more weapons everyday.

“I want to remind the American people, if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our 'global test.' Saddam Hussein would still be in power. He would control all those weapons and explosives and could have shared them with our terrorist enemies.

“Now the Senator is making wild charges about missing explosives when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, 'we do not know the facts.' Think about that. The Senator's denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts. Unfortunately, that's part of a pattern of saying almost anything to get elected — like when Senator Kerry charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said the Senator's understanding of events does not square with reality, and our intelligence reports placed bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time. Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it's ongoing — and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your Commander in Chief.

"When it comes to your security, when it comes to the security of our families, my opponent takes a very different approach. He says that September the 11th did not change him much at all. And his policies make that clear. He says the War on Terror is primarily a law enforcement and intelligence-gathering operation. Well, September 11th changed me. I remember the day I was in the — at Ground Zero, September the 14th, 2001. It's a day I will never forget; there were workers in hard hats there yelling at me at the top of their lungs, 'whatever it takes.' I remember a man grabbed me by the arm, he looked me square in the eye, and he said, 'Do not let me down.' Ever since that day, I wake up every morning trying to figure out how to better protect America. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes."
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