White House Press Corps.org: Press Gaggle by Dana Perino 08/31/06 (Topic: Iraq)

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Press Gaggle by Dana Perino 08/31/06 (Topic: Iraq)
— Thursday, August 31, 2006 —

Q Dana, I just was wondering if you could address what the President talked about today. He seemed to group together Sunni followers of al Qaeda along with Shiites in Iraq who are involved in the sectarian violence, and these groups are fighting each other. So I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on how he thinks these groups are united in one belief?

MS. PERINO: The point of today's speech and the key of today's speech was to show that there is a common thread. You see that the violence that is happening around -- one of the things I mentioned yesterday was that these different groups share an ideology of hatred and use tactics of murder of innocent people, and that there is a common thread that ties all those together.

And so the point of the speech today was to take a step back and to look at the global war on terror in a broader context. One of the reasons for doing a series of speeches is because the global war on terror is very complex, there are a lot of different parts to it, and if the President were to try to address all the parts in one speech, most likely he wouldn't accomplish anything because there would be too much to say. And so by breaking it up this way, you can address the different issues over a period of time when America is, rightly, thinking about the global war on terror, and especially today, he focused on the war in Iraq.

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Posted by WhiteHousePressCorps.org @ 11:04 PM

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