Following the August 19, 2003, attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, President Bush said, regarding former Baathist officials, on August 22, 2003: ” ‘These people decided that, well, they’d rather fight than work for peaceful reconstruction of Iraq because they weren’t going to be in power anymore. I also believe there’s a foreign element that is moving into Iraq and these will be al-Qaeda-type fighters. They want to fight us there because they can’t stand the thought of a free society in the Middle East. They hate freedom. They hate the thought of a democracy emerging. And therefore, they want to violently prevent that from happening.’ ”
– Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Page 247