The Question In My Mind Is How

[in Response To The Question "do You Think That You Underestimated The Insurgency's Strength?"] I Think So. I Guess If I Look Back On It Now, I Don't Think Anybody Anticipated The Level Of Violence That We've Encountered.

I Feel Very Strongly That The Significance Of 9/11 Cannot Be Underestimated. It Forces Us To Think In New Ways About Strategy, About National Security, About How We Structure Our Forces And About How We Use U.s. Military Power.

America Has Shown We Are Serious About Removing The Threat Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction... We Now Know That Saddam Hussein Had The Capacity To Produce Weapons Of Mass Destruction.... We Know He Had The Necessary Infrastructure Because We Found The Labs And The Dual-use Facilities That Could Be Used For These Chemical And Biological Agents. We Know That He Was Developing The Delivery Systems - Ballistic Missiles - That Had Been Prohibited By The United Nations.

It Used To Be You Needed To Have A Very Large Sophisticated State Before You Could Even Have A Nuclear Weapon... Now The Technology Is Widespread Enough. It Doesn't Take Very Many People To Be Able To Cobble Together A Devastating Attack, And All It Takes Is One.

It’s Clearly Established In Terms Of Training, Provision Of Bomb-making Experts, Training Of People With Respect To Chemical And Biological Warfare Capabilities, That Al-qaeda Sent Personnel To Iraq For Training And So Forth.