BUSH CANDOR: DECISIONS HAVE MADE IRAQ MORE UNSTABLE

Drudge Report ^ | January 13, 2007 | Matt Drudge

[West Coast Conservative]

The president concedes that his decisions have led to more instability in Iraq. President Bush made the admission in an exclusive interview with Scott Pelley at Camp David yesterday (12), his first interview since addressing the nation about Iraq. It will be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 14 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

The president says the current sectarian violence in Iraq, is a destabilizing factor that "could lead to attacks here in America" and must be controlled. He defended his decision to invade Iraq in the same way, saying Saddam was competing with Iran to get a nuclear weapon and making the region unstable. But when pressed by Pelley, Bush concedes that conditions in Iraq are much worse now.

Pelley: But wasn't it your administration that created the instability in Iraq? Bush: "Our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran... He was a significant source of instability. Pelley: It's much more unstable now, Mr. President. Bush: Well, no question, decisions have made things unstable.

"I think history is going to look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it," says Bush.

Toppling Saddam was not a mistake, however. "My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability," Bush tells Pelley. "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqi's express that."

The execution of Saddam was mishandled, says the president, who saw only parts of it on the Internet because he didn't want to watch the dictator fall through the trap door. "I thought it was discouraging... It's important that that chapter of Iraqi history be closed. [But] They could have handled it a lot better."

[Max01]

No it does not. Taking out a totalitarian regime will cause instability. Look at the Soviet Union when it collapsed. If this statementemnt is taken to heart by Bush supporters then it will have a negative effect. So don't LET IT!!!!

[plain talk]

more Americans were killed in auto accidents over that period. We lost 3000 people over here in 2 hours.

The deficit spending is due to entitlements. The first dollar we spend is on defense because without it nothing else matters.

[SolidWood]

The Bush Administration gets a straight F for PR.

They should have implemented full censorship on all war-related news and kicked out ALL those smelly journazists out of the war zone. And why the HELL is the President giving an Interview to CBS!? He should know they will be using him for their propaganda! It's the same level of naivity as Richard Perle and co. giving interviews to Vanity Fair, only to find out they were fooled for more liberal propganda.

[Blackirish]

Wall Street analysts are entire UNCONCERNED about the deficit.

---

Just like this fiscally liberal administration. They spend money like they hate the stuff.

[Txsleuth]

Much ado about nothing...he has already said in his speech on Wednesday that mistakes were made that have caused us to have to change tactics.

I betcha every military expert will tell you that what Pres. Bush said is true of EVERY war that has ever been fought.

The actual war to get rid of Saddam, which was from a 1998 resolution...WAS fought almost perfectly. But, they say, that war plans have to be changed from the second the first troops sets foot on the ground.

I KNOW the Dems and Sissy Chrissy Matthews will use this as PROOF that Bush is even more of an "idiot" than they have been telling us for 6 years...but, it will be the same ole song, 100th verse...IMHO>

[PSYCHO-FREEP]

All opinions Coming from your fragmented group of cynical defeatist/protectionist fanatics, carries a credibility rating of minus 8. (We'll give you 2 positive points for predictability.)

[plain talk]

OK. So they inferred the word "my" because Bush doesn't always use pronouns. I've seen far more slanted headlines than this one which is fair game based on what he said.

[KantianBurke]

Mark Bowden of "Black Hawk Down" fame wrote it best when towards the end of that novel he quoted a woman from Somalia regarding clan warfare which has torn that country apart. Am paraphrasing but the gist of the woman's comment was that "these people do not want peace. They want power and if that mean's genocide/ war/ ect these disfunctional 3rd world nations are willing to endure it.

Once again, it was foolish to think that these nutcases could be civilized.

[Peach]

Deficits matter when compared to GDP. Since the deficit as compared to the GDP is at nearly (if not totally) historic lows, there's no reason for concern.

Unless you just like to complain.

[jrooney]

9/11 was planned for at least three years before it occurred and Clinton did not do a damn thing to stop those terrorists from getting in. If there is one person to blame for terrorism being carried out on our soil it is Bill Clinton, and his top national security advisor would not be stealing documents from the archives and hiding them under a construction trailer and stuffing them into his socks if they were not guily.

[Christian4Bush]

from the Eaglet: Do you really think President Bush should not apologize for the 3,000 Americans who died in Iraq and the deficit spending that occurred under his pen in the past 6 years?

No. I am sick to death of everyone's damn apologies and requests for apologies.

If I were inclined to want apologies, I would want apologies from the people who killed 3000 people in our country, and caused billions of dollars in damage to our country, in TWO HOURS, not in four years. And those deaths would have been higher, were it not for the actions of this President and his administration.

I would want apologies from that BJ loving sorry excuse for a human, piece of excrement president that preceded George W. Bush, and succeeded his father, Bush 41), who loathed the military, evaded the draft and who did nothing about the growing threat that - once again - a Republican president has had to go in and clean-up, at the cost of lives and finances.

I would also expect apologies from the blathering demagogues, such like "The Eaglet" (certainly not you, Peach) that pretend like 3000 deaths in four years is an abysmal failure, but deaths in numbers of the hundreds of thousands in previous wars is ok and noble...perhaps because they were started by Democrats?

People make their decisions. They stand by their decisions. That's how "real life" is. No more damn apologies.

Rant over...for now.

[RatsDawg]

The real question should be one that Bush should ask 60 Mins, "Where the hell did those fake National Gaurd documents come from?"

[GSlob]

As if stability is a good thing all by itself, in every place and at every time, and for everybody. Well, it is not always the case.

[CedarDave]

All he has to say is:
Saddam had ample opportunity to hide those weapons, we have found planes buried in the sand and we may never know what was there or not there. But we do know that he had WMDs because he used them on his own people and we found them, - we just have not found large caches. etc

Everytime I hear the lib crap about how we never found WMD I get equally PO'd with them and the unwilliness or inabaility of the administration to articulate just these facts. I don't understand why we do not continue to make the case instead of just leading the US/Bush haters frame the debate the way they do. And I know some think Russia had something to do with it, but nonetheless, we should tell history like it is (lots of evidence that WMD's and other things were moved/hidden in advance of our attack) and not shove the facts to the back burner.

[AliVeritas]

I want Maliki to personally cut off Mookie Al Sadr's head live... or I don't believe him.

Maliki sure told him, that's why this came out:
AP warning... by staff, no less.

'New troops may leave Iraq in coffins'
http://www.news.com.au/sundayheraldsun/story/0,,21051130-5005961,00.html

[Sword_Svalbardt]

Who is attacking who? Sounds like our fearful leader is forgetting his base again.

[Earthdweller]

"The president concedes that his decisions have led to more instability in Iraq."

Just the thing that is needed before order. Thumbs up Mr. President.

[The_Eaglet]

Why would someone be "weenie" for being concerned about 3000 Americans dying or government waste of present and future tax dollars?

Spare me the liberal invective tactics, please.

[jrooney]

I think you misread me. I am not taking it to heart at all. I support GW 110% and think Iraq is much better now that Saddam is gone. Mistakes are always made in wars, so you make corrections. That is what GW is going now. I support him 110%.

[Yo-Yo]

If Saddam himself didn't know exactly what WMDs he had, I hardly think Bush can be blamed for not knowing prior to the invasion.

Times of London

The Times

January 27, 2004

Iraqi scientists 'fooled Saddam and cashed in'

From Catherine Philp and Stephen Farrell in Baghdad

IT WAS a simple enough experiment, hardly groundbreaking, but the scientists could be certain that Saddam Hussein would not know that.

After working out how to extract a tiny amount of plutonium from radioactive waste, the atomic team drew up a long, self-congratulatory report detailing their big breakthrough on the road to building a nuclear bomb.

“They were seeking money from Saddam, so they told him things that weren’t true, things that exaggerated their capability,” Hamid el-Bahili, a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Baghdad, told The Times. “They sent their report claiming they could produce huge amounts of plutonium and they were rewarded with cars and large sums of money, but all they had achieved was something a high school student could have done.”

The deception was no aberration. While weapons scientists admit that they largely failed in their attempt to conceal their activities from United Nations inspectors, many confess that they had considerably more success in another deception: hoodwinking their own leader over the extent of his weapons arsenal in an attempt to curry favour, win promotions or secure funds for programmes that never existed.

That systematic deception and the institutional chaos that allowed it to flourish may provide one explanation for why Western intelligence agencies appear to have got their facts so wrong over how much of a threat Saddam really posed.

In an interview with The New York Times yesterday, David Kay, the increasingly outspoken former weapons-hunter who resigned last week, spoke of a “vortex of corruption”, deception and disarray within Iraq that may have given rise to the perception that Saddam’s arsenal was far more advanced than it really was.

The new revelations followed his earlier assertion that, contrary to intelligence reports, Saddam had possessed no significant stockpiles of weapons or arms programmes since their destruction in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. According to Dr Kay, after Saddam insisted on personally taking over the authorisation of large weapons projects in the late 1990s, scientists began to exploit the system to line their own pockets, presenting him with fanciful plans for arms developments and using the funds granted for their own purposes.

Whatever had remained of an effective weapons capability, Dr Kay said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-making ventures by scientists exploiting Saddam’s ignorance of technical matters.

“The whole thing shifted from directed programmes to a corrupted process,” Dr Kay told The New York Times. “The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self- directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programmes.”

Scientists in Baghdad told The Times in a series of interviews that the culture of deception went back years, getting worse when Saddam himself took over direct control of the programme.

At first, many programme supervisors exaggerated the progress that they had made under pressure from the authorities for results. Others did so to win promotions. Abdul Tawab Mullah Huwaish, the former head of the military industrial commission, was the man the scientists most commonly cited as the architect of the institutional deception. One chemical engineer said: “

Once he told Saddam that we were in the final stages of producing rocket fuel when the truth was we were only at the beginning. Then, to cover that up, we had to import 250 tonnes of rocket fuel from China, but he told Saddam that we had produced it ourselves.”

By 1998, with the departure of UN inspectors and leadership of the arms programmes taken over by Saddam, the deceptions grew easier and more lucrative. “Saddam was not an educated man, he was a country boy from Tikrit,” Dr el-Bahili said. “It was easy for scientists to pull the wool over his eyes by bombarding him with science.”

According to Dr Kay, the money-making ventures of venal weapons developers may well have played a role in convincing the world that Saddam’s arsenal was a threat.

At least one scientist involved in such a “programme” holds his bosses responsible for the consequences of that perception. “I believe that they are the real reason behind the destruction of Iraq because they told lies to the President,” he said.

What remains unclear is whether Saddam was taken in by the lies or whether he hurtled towards war on the basis of a bluff, knowing that his armoury was bare. “I believe it was a bit of both,” Dr el-Bahili said. “The scientists lied to Saddam and he lied to the world.”