Bush And Blair Admit Errors

[Amadeus]

Bush and Blair admit Iraq errors

 

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush have made a stark public acknowledgement that they made mistakes in Iraq.

 

Mr Bush said the biggest US error was the prison abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib, which it was now paying for. The two leaders have never admitted their mistakes in such frank terms, the BBC's Jonathan Beale says....

 

...Asked about mistakes in Iraq, Mr Bush brought up the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. "We've been paying for that for a long period of time," he said. He also said he regretted having used unsophisticated language such as "Wanted dead or alive", which had been misinterpreted in some parts of the world...

 

...Mr Blair, who held talks with new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki in Baghdad this week, was also prepared to acknowledge errors, accepting that the exclusion of all of Saddam Hussein's Baath party members from leadership roles may have only fuelled the insurgency. But both men remained convinced that they had done the right thing in Iraq.

 

Shame the two didn't say what everyone wanted to hear - that it was a bad idea to go in there in the first place...

 

Apart from that, it was actually really worth watching (was live on BBC last night) - it's just amazing to see how superior Blair's rhetoric skills are compared to Bush, especially when it came to the question about mistakes - Bush simply came over as a simpleton, saying what he thought - but Blair was totally in his role, going on and on without actually really admitting anything - boy, that man can talk...

[VinnieK]

I thought it was amazing to watch just to see how inferior in quality the British journalists were in comparison to their American equivalents.

 

Although 'Bush-Blair' admit regrets over Iraq is a snappy old headline, it doesn't actually tell us much that we didn't already know/couldn't have guessed at. The British journalists seemed preoccupied entirely with fishing with that kind of catchy but superficial headline, asking banal questions like "what will you miss about each other?" that didn't really go anywhere.

 

In comparison, the Americans were pretty much consistently applying the pressure with well thought out, detailed policy questions that even made the Prime Minister hesitate a couple of times in his answers, without ever coming across as too hostile or beligerant. Generally they just seemed a whole lot more professional and knowledgable about the subject they were asking about.