Washington – President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday night acknowledged a series of errors in managing the occupation of Iraq that have made the conflict more difficult and more damaging to the U.S. image abroad, even as they insisted that enough progress has been made that other nations should support the nascent Iraqi government.
In a joint news conference, Bush said he had used inappropriate “tough talk” – such as saying “bring ’em on” in reference to insurgents – that he said “sent the wrong signal to people.”
He also said the “biggest mistake” for the United States was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which guards photographed themselves sexually tormenting Iraqi prisoners, spawning revulsion worldwide.
“We’ve been paying for that for a long period of time,” he said.
Blair, who visited Baghdad this week, said he and Bush should have recognized that the fall of President Saddam Hussein would not “be the rise of a democratic Iraq, that it was going to be a more difficult process” because “you’re talking about literally building the institutions of a state from scratch.”
While Bush increasingly has begun to acknowledge missteps in handling the war, his comments Thursday night – together with Blair’s – represent his most explicit acknowledgment that the administration underestimated the difficulty of the central project of his presidency.
The hour-long news conference came at a moment of acute political weakness for both men, who repeatedly emphasized that Iraq is finally turning a corner and that, whatever their other misjudgments, the decision to attack Iraq remains justified.
