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 Home > News & Policies > June 2004

For Immediate Release
June 3, 2004

Global Message

From remarks by President Bush, at the U.S. Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony, Colorado Springs, CO, 6/2/04

Just as events in Europe determined the outcome of the Cold War, events in the Middle East will set the course of the War on Terror.

If the Middle East is abandoned to dictators and terrorists, it will be a constant source of violence and alarm -- exporting killers of increasingly destructive power to attack America and other free nations.

If the Middle East grows in democracy, prosperity, and hope, the terrorist movement will lose its sponsors, lose its recruits, and lose the festering grievances that keep terrorists in business.

President Bush is calling for the:

  • Use of every available tool to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy terrorists and their organizations;
  • Denial to terrorists those places of sanctuary and support and prevention of the emergence of terrorist-controlled states;
  • Use of all elements of national power to deny terrorists the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons they seek;
  • Pursuit of freedom and reform in the broader Middle East; and
  • Disruption of the flow of recruits into the terrorist movement by offering a real and hopeful alternative.

All elements of this strategy are being applied and tested in Iraq. America removed a state sponsor of terror with a history of using weapons of mass destruction.

We now face al-Qaida associates like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who seek to hijack Iraq's future.

Our enemies want us to retreat, leaving Iraq to tyranny but our coalition is determined -- and the Iraqi people have made it clear: Iraq will remain in the camp of freedom.