Quote:
Originally Posted by Spencer Collins
Bush warns of Iraq disaster
President Bush in a Tuesday interview expressed in unusually frank terms his disappointment over flawed pre-war intelligence and acknowledged his fears about leaving an unfinished war to a Democratic successor.
In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — Bush’s first for an online audience — the president said his doomsday scenario for a premature withdrawal “of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States.”
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.
“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"
In a reversal of the usual question that’s put to him, a query submitted online asked the president whether he felt he had been misled about Iraq as he made the decision to go to war.
‘Misled’ is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional,” Bush said. “I don't think so. … Intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.”
Congress has since pushed, and Bush has signed, various intelligence reforms, including the creation of a director of national intelligence, whose job it is to help the various parts of the intelligence community share information.
“Do I think somebody lied to me?” he said. “No, I don't. I think it was just, you know, they analyzed the situation and came up with the wrong conclusion.”
Bush warns of Iraq disaster - Mike Allen - Politico.com
And so now we know the rest of the story,well..at least we know why he has not been playing golf and I can understand that.
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For the record, write this down and then stow it away on a back shelf in an old cookie jar to be opened in the future when more about the decision to invade Iraq is finally revealed to the public, here is what I believe we will discover.
The Israelis were threatening, behind the scenes, to take out the WMD's themselves and we did not want to risk the possible consequences of what might have resulted from that, so we decided to invade.
And that will be in addition to some other factors which also existed simultaneously. Let's never revert to a "ONE REASON FOR THE INVASION" discussion. There were many reasons and most of them were good ones.
Once again, rather than allowing the Israelis to protect themselves by making a pre-emptive strike on the WMD's we chose to go in instead and in so doing we prevented the possibility of a much larger conflagration which could easily have gotten out of hand.