WASHINGTON — 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.
