Bush Admits Mistakes but Defends War

President Bush said Wednesday that he accepted responsibility for deciding to wage war in Iraq in part on the basis of faulty intelligence, but that he remained convinced history would conclude he had done the right thing.

Speaking hours before Iraqis began arriving at the polls to elect a new government, Bush acknowledged miscalculations and mistakes before and after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003.

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush told a group of political leaders and scholars at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson Center. “As president, I’m responsible for the decision to go into Iraq, and I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities.”

After the invasion, U.S. forces never found the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration had cited as a primary justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Even so, Bush said, “given Saddam’s history and the lessons of Sept. 11, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision. Saddam was a threat, and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power.”

Although Bush has previously cited flaws in prewar intelligence and defended his decision to enter Iraq, Wednesday’s remarks were his most explicit statement that he bore responsibility for launching a war based in part on what turned out to be false claims.

Bush’s critics said they were not convinced that the president’s original decision was justified, or that today’s election would lead to changes that would make America or the Middle East safer.

“The election could lead to a change for the better, which is everybody’s hope, but it might be a step toward crisis and toward all-out civil war,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a news conference before the president’s speech.

Levin and other Democrats said the outcome would depend in part on the administration’s willingness to pressure Iraq’s new government to revise its constitution so that minority Sunnis would feel less excluded from the political process.

Bush’s speech was the last of four major policy addresses on Iraq, in which he has adopted a strategy of offering a more forthright discussion of some of the flawed assumptions and unexpected setbacks accompanying the war.

In three previous speeches in recent weeks, Bush admitted that the training of Iraqi security forces had proved to be more difficult than anticipated, that postwar reconstruction had proceeded in “fits and starts,” and that the initial U.S. plan for establishing a new government was not acceptable to Iraqis.

In each case, he said, the United States had learned from its mistakes and had adapted to changing circumstances on the ground.

This week, Bush also acknowledged for the first time that an estimated 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the war, in addition to 2,140 U.S. military casualties.

White House officials hope the president’s candor will help counteract a steep slide in his approval ratings, which have bounced about the 40% level for several weeks, as well as turn around declining public support for the war. A majority of Americans said in recent surveys that they considered the war a mistake.

A poll released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center suggested that the president’s bully pulpit campaign was producing mixed results. Although 61% of participants said Iraqi security forces were becoming more capable and 58% saw signs of progress in establishing a democracy, 53% thought the United States was losing ground in reducing civilian casualties.

In his speech Wednesday, Bush characterized today’s parliamentary elections as part of a “watershed moment in the story of freedom,” as Iraqis choose 275 members from a field of 7,000 candidates to serve four-year terms in a national assembly. It will be the first permanent government since the U.S.-led invasion.

But he cautioned that it might be weeks before the election winners were known, and that it would take more time to form a government. Meanwhile, he said, the insurgents were not likely to lay down their arms.

“These enemies are not going to give up because of a successful election,” Bush said. “They know that as democracy takes root in Iraq, their hateful ideology will suffer a devastating blow. So we can expect violence to continue.”

Bush expressed confidence that Iraq’s Sunni Muslim population would become increasingly involved in the political process and less inclined to support insurgents’ efforts.

Many Sunnis initially declined to participate in the formation of an interim assembly and in the drafting of a constitution this year, fearing that the new government would be dominated by Iraq’s two other major groups, the Shiites and the Kurds. Bush cited signs that Sunnis were more engaged in today’s elections.

“As Sunnis join the political process, Iraqi democracy becomes more inclusive, and the terrorists and Saddamists are becoming marginalized,” Bush said.

The president rejected demands by some congressional Democrats and other critics to set a firm timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops.

Doing so, he said, would be a “recipe for disaster” that would lead the Iraqi people to believe the United States no longer supported them, and it would convince the insurgents that they needed only to wait a little longer. He said such a move also would signal to other governments that America was an unreliable ally. In addition, he said, it would demoralize U.S. troops.

Bush said he would consider America’s mission to be complete when insurgents could no longer threaten Iraq’s democracy, when Iraqi security forces could protect the country, and when Iraq was no longer a haven for terrorists.

Before Bush delivered his remarks, 40 Senate Democrats and one independent signed a letter asking the president to present a plan identifying the remaining political, economic and military benchmarks for achieving victory in Iraq, and to set forth a “reasonable schedule” for achieving them.

“He hasn’t leveled with the American people or laid out a strategy for success,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters.

One of the lawmakers who signed the letter, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), predicted that unless changes were made to the constitution to address the concerns of Sunnis, “there is still a great danger that there will be continued violence and even the possibility of a civil war and a fragmentation of the country.”