So, President Bush is blaming the Dems for the problems in Iraq.  Faster troop rotations are the Dems fault.  Longer tours of duty the Dems fault. 

The Dems also don’t understand that if America leaves before the “job” is done, the terrorists will follow us home according to the President.  My only problem with this statement is that it doesn’t make any sense.  Our borders are currently porous.  Don’t the terrorists know where we live?  Why can’t they come over now?  Why would they wait until we come home from Iraq to attack us at home?  As a matter of fact, with the Army tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t it be easier for them to slip in the country now instead of waiting until our Army comes home?  I’m just askin’ because I’m so tired of statements that don’t make any sense. 

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The President spoke today at the American Legion:

They recognized what I recognized, and it’s important for the American citizen to recognize this, that if we were to have stepped back from Baghdad before the Iraqis were capable of securing their capital, before they had the troops trained well enough to secure the capital, there would have been a vacuum that could have easily been filled by Sunni and Shia extremists, radicals that would be bolstered by outside forces. In other words, the lack of security would have created an opportunity for extremists to move in. Most people want to live in peace in Iraq. There are extremists who can’t stand the thought of a free society that would have taken advantage of the vacuum. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country, and in time the violence could affect the entire region.

What happens in the Middle East matters here in America. The terrorists would have emerged under this scenario more emboldened. They would have said, our enemy, the United States, the enemy that we attacked, turns out to be what they thought: weak in the face of violence, weak in the face of challenge. They would have been able to more likely recruit. They would have had new safe haven from which to launch attacks. Imagine a scenario in which the extremists are able to control oil revenues to achieve economic blackmail, to achieve their objectives. This is all what they have stated. This is their ambition.

If we retreat — were to retreat from Iraq, what’s interesting and different about this war is that the enemy would follow us here. And that’s why it’s important we succeed in Iraq. If this scenario were to take place, 50 years from now people would look back and say, “What happened to those folks in the year 2007? How come they couldn’t see the danger of a Middle East spiraling out of control where extremists competed for power, but they shared an objective which was to harm the United States of America? How come they couldn’t remember the lesson of September the 11th, that we were no longer protected by oceans and chaos and violence, and extremism could end up being a serious danger to the homeland?”