“On May 1, 2003, aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq had ended. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was ‘a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.’ For the umpteenth time Bush once again bracketed Saddam and 9/11: ‘The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001 and still goes on.’ The president went on to describe the 9/11 attacks, ‘the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble,’ as if this had any bearing on the Iraq War. The president also made the definitive statement that Saddam was ‘an ally of al-Qaeda,’ something that his own intelligence agencies had determined was not the case before the war.”
– Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 172