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To: calgal who wrote (18323)	12/2/2003 1:06:10 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 793778

The President's comments re-posted: December 01, 2003, 8:56 a.m. “We Will Stay Until the Job Is Done.” Freedom and human dignity in post-Saddam Iraq. By President George W. Bush EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the text of the speech President George W. Bush delivered on Nov. 27 in Baghdad, Iraq. Thank you. I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere. Thank you for inviting me to dinner. General Sanchez, thank you, sir, for your kind invitation and your strong leadership. Ambassador Bremer, thank you for your steadfast belief in freedom and peace. I want to thank the members of the Governing Council who are here, pleased you are joining us on our nation's great holiday, it's a chance to give thanks to the Almighty for the many blessings we receive. I'm particularly proud to be with the 1st Armored Division, the 2nd ACR, the 82nd Airborne. I can't think of a finer group of folks to have Thanksgiving dinner with than you all. We're proud of you. Today, Americans are gathering with their loved ones to give thanks for the many blessings in our lives. And this year we are especially thankful for the courage and the sacrifice of those who defend us, the men and women of the United States military. I bring a message on behalf of America: we thank you for your service, we're proud of you, and America stands solidly behind you. Together, you and I have taken an oath to defend our country. You're honoring that oath. The United States military is doing a fantastic job. You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country. You're defeating Saddam's henchmen, so that the people of Iraq can live in peace and freedom. By helping the Iraqi people become free, you're helping change a troubled and violent part of the world. By helping to build a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East, you are defending the American people from danger and we are grateful. You're engaged in a difficult mission. Those who attack our Coalition forces and kill innocent Iraqis are testing our will. They hope we will run. We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost in casualties, defeat a brutal dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins. We will prevail. We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive. And we will win because you're part of the finest military ever assembled. And we will prevail because the Iraqis want their freedom. Every day you see firsthand the commitment to sacrifice that the Iraqi people are making to secure their own freedom. I have a message for the Iraqi people: you have an opportunity to seize the moment and rebuild your great country, based on human dignity and freedom. The regime of Saddam Hussein is gone forever. The United States and our Coalition will help you, help you build a peaceful country so that your children can have a bright future. We'll help you find and bring to justice the people who terrorized you for years and are still killing innocent Iraqis. We will stay until the job is done. I'm confident we will succeed, because you, the Iraqi people, will show the world that you're not only courageous, but that you can govern yourself wisely and justly. On this Thanksgiving, our nation remembers the men and women of our military, your friends and comrades who paid the ultimate price for our security and freedom. We ask for God's blessings on their families, their loved ones and their friends, and we pray for your safety and your strength, as you continue to defend America and to spread freedom. Each one of you has answered a great call, participating in an historic moment in world history. You live by a code of honor, of service to your nation, with the safety and the security of your fellow citizens. Our military is full of the finest people on the face of the earth. I'm proud to be your Commander-in-Chief. I bring greetings from America. May God bless you all.

To: calgal who wrote (18323)	12/2/2003 1:07:03 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793778

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG Baghdad in an Alternate Universe There's little reality in the coverage of Bush's Iraq trip. Tuesday, December 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST Bulletin: The president's surprise Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops in Iraq isn't going to change the outcome of the war! That keen analysis, delivered by any number of instant commentators in the hours after the news of the visit broke, must have come as something of a surprise to U.S. audiences paying attention--even those accustomed both to the steady flow of irrelevancies and to the solemn warnings about assumptions it would have occurred to no one to make that we can always depend on hearing on occasions of this kind. Just how many people watching that Thanksgiving mess-hall scene would have been struck by the thought that this would--aha!--change the outcome of the war, most of us know. The answer is of course no one--no one in his right mind. But the reality of the audience and the condition of their minds is a matter wholly foreign to the concerns of most of the correspondents--a truth most Americans have long understood and accepted. Somewhere along the way, they realized that occasions like this (short on dark aspects and close to a purely moving event) pose a problem in that universe inhabited by a good part of the press--a place where journalists toil and compete, disconnected from the realities governing the rest of the world. There were, generally speaking, two kinds of reporting on this event, so imbued with emotion. One type offered the occasion as it had unfolded and let the facts and pictures--the footage capturing the roars of joy from the weary troops when they spied their commander in chief, there with them so unexpectedly--tell the story. For an exemplar of the other sort we had the commentary of CNN's Walter Rodgers, a sturdy on-the-scene journalist for the most part, though on this occasion he was not among the reporters at that mess hall. Minutes after the news broke, his report focused on one central point: He didn't want to be a spoiler, he let it be known, but it was clear that, whether deliberately "or unconsciously," the president's trip had been timed as a way of upstaging Sen. Hillary Clinton's visit to the region the next day. Mr. Rodgers delivered this point several times more, his tone suggesting bountiful gratitude for the powers that had led him to unearth this insight--Thanksgiving comes but once a year. To someone imbibing the ethers of the aforementioned hothouse journalistic world, it must have seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude--however bizarre the proposition sounded to anyone out there in the real world--that all the months of secret planning that had gone into this venture had been undertaken for the sole purpose of deflecting attention from Mrs. Clinton's trip. Not only reasonable but important enough to repeat several times. And it offered plenty of inoculation against any charge that this veteran reporter had failed to cut through the joyful nature of this story to discern its dark underside. Departing from the subject of the president's unconscious, Mr. Rodgers turned to historical parallels to announce that Lyndon Johnson had gone to Vietnam--and that that trip hadn't changed the outcome of the war. The next day, we were to hear from Tom Rosenstiel, the head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institution that could only in times like ours be regarded as a light unto the press. Well known for emissions of the highest purity as regards press standards, Mr. Rosenstiel told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that the secrecy of the trip was "just not kosher," that reporters are in the business of telling the truth and that they couldn't decide it was OK to lie sometimes because it serves a "higher truth or good." Fortunately, those involved in making security arrangements to Iraq--a war zone--failed to consult Mr. Rosenstiel and colleagues to determine whether they passed proper journalistic standards. We can scarcely imagine how distressed the latter must be at all the U.S. journalists who have kept the secrets of troop movements to themselves in wartime--much less what they would have said about all the Allied leaders' efforts to mislead the world about the target of the D-Day invasion. Most of the press, it should be said, understood perfectly well that there were good reasons the security requirements for the president's trip were what they were and said so--which fact did not diminish Mr. Rosenstiel's apparently profound distress. Feelings whose source may perhaps best be explained by another of his charges--that the unexpected nature of the president's visit made it a big story and that, by going along with the secrecy, reporters had "helped Bush politically." The ethers in that special world of journalists, and particularly in the case of the Project for Excellence and its head--who seems to have been imbibing a particularly potent kind--appear to be taking their toll. Nothing, though, that a case-hardened public couldn't take in stride. URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/medialog/?id=110004371