KARL ROVE ON THE IRAQ WAR

From the same lecture at U of Utah:

Audience Member: You hinted at that. But what I want to know is apparently, [you are] not paying a lot of attention to the 200,000 people who marched in Washington on April 26 and the hundreds of thousands who have marched all over the world, and there are one or two people here today. My question to you is: How can we get our government’s ear, those of us who are opposed to this invasion. Thank you. [Some applause and cheering from crowd.]

Mr. Rove: The way to do it is to do it the way that everybody else does, which is talk to your representatives and petition the Congress, and petition the President. You talk about 200,000 people. With all due respect, I worry about the 3,000 people killed on 9-11. [Applause.] I have a 13-year old. I would like to leave to my child a world that is peaceful, not a world that is threatened by transnational global terrorism. [Applause.]
Let me give you just one example. We need to see the world as it is, not as we would desire it to be. We have an organization that is sophisticated, well financed and dangerous. It is not five guys in some cave someplace. Al Qaida—these people, have access to cash flow in the tens of billions of dollars. We shut down one charity in Arlington, Texas that last year shipped $13 million to Al Qaida. Do you know how many people went through those training camps in Afghanistan? One hundred thousand. Some of them, 15,000 or 20,000, went through sophisticated training in electronics, spycraft, small weapons, explosives, biological and chemical weapons.
These people mounted a sophisticated operation aimed at the United States of America, and if anybody thinks they have now gone away or that they do not desire to hurt us and harm us, or to drive us back out of the world, you are kidding yourself. If we want to leave our children a legacy of a dangerous world, where people unbound by convention have access to some of the world’s worst weapons and have demonstrated a willingness to use them, then we either do not see this job to its conclusion or we fail – because that’s exactly the legacy we will leave them. [Applause.]