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 Home > News & Policies > June 2003

Renewal in Iraq

For Immediate Release
June 12, 2003

Global Message

KEY POINTS: MIDDLE EAST

From the President’s remarks in Chicago, 6/11/03

President Bush condemned Wednesday’s bus bombing in Jerusalem. The militant Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed at least 16 people and injured more than 30.

  • It is clear there are people in the Middle East who hate peace; who want to kill to make sure peace doesn’t happen.
  • It is clear that there are people who kill to make sure the desires of the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority and others of a peaceful state, living side-by-side with Israel, do not happen.
  • President Bush urges nations that want to see peace in the Middle East to fight terror, cut off money from organizations like Hamas and to isolate those who are willing to kill to stop peace from happening.
  • President Bush is calling upon all of the free world and peace-loving nations to not only condemn the killings, but to use their power to prevent them in the future.

Tales of Brutality in Saddam's Iraq

"Now, 12 Years Later, Mr. Shaati Cannot Remember If the Women and children beside him screamed as the bullets hit, or whether the men in the hole moaned as they died. He only recalls a moment of hollow silence when the soldiers stopped shooting. Then came the throaty rumble of a backhoe and the thud of wet earth dropping on bodies. He survived but saw hundreds of other innocents buried in another of Saddam Hussein's anonymous mass graves." --The New York Times, 6/2/03

To learn more about the Iraqi regime's brutality, please visit: /news/releases/2003/06/iraq/20030603-7.html

Rebuilding Afghanistan

From remarks on 6/9/03 by Grant Aldonas, U.S. Department of Commerce Under Secretary for International Trade, in Chicago

-The people of Afghanistan, subjected by despots to more than two decades of war, tyranny, repression, malice and murder, must and will rise again, and we pledge to help them.

-The United States is not only committed to rebuilding Afghanistan - we are also committed to rebuilding Afghanistan in a way that encourages peace and stability, commerce and opportunity, and freedom and democracy.

-We will do this by building infrastructure for systems such as health care, education, energy and transportation.

-President Bush's designation of Afghanistan as a beneficiary of the Generalized System of Preferences will permit some 5,700 products manufactured and originated in Afghanistan to enter the U.S. duty free.

-The President believes that remarkable changes will come from implementing a government that divides the economic interest of the people from those of the government, encourages economic freedom, and eliminates barriers to trade. This will sow the seeds of free markets.

-It is important that we set the Afghan people free - allowing them to create an economic destiny where they can live and succeed, and their ideas, innovation, and efforts will be rewarded.