For Immediate Release
September 16, 2003

Global Message

From remarks by Vice President Cheney on NBC's Meet the Press, 9/14/03

"[T]he theme that comes through repeatedly for me is that 9/11 changed everything. It changed the way we think about threats to the United States."

"It's very important we make that transition to understanding that we're at war, that the war continues, that this is a global enemy that struck in not only New York and Washington but in Bali, in Jakarta, in Mombasa, in Casablanca and Riyadh since 9/11, that this is an enterprise that is global in scope."

"[W]e went there specifically to take down the Saddam Hussein regime, to wrap up all WMD capability that he had possessed or developed, to deal with the threat that his regime represented to the region and to the United States. A very significant challenge. But we have, in fact, I think, been very successful at achieving it."

"We've now got a 25-man Governing Council in place, made up of Iraqis, a broad, representative group of Iraqi officials. We've got Iraqis now in charge of each ministry in the government. We've got 90 percent, over 90 percent, of the cities and towns and villages of Iraq are now governed by democratically elected or appointed local councils."

"We've been successful, to some extent, in getting international support. We've got a Polish division that we stood up, Polish-led division we stood up a few weeks ago that has troops in it from 17 countries."