Bush Denies Ever Tying Saddam Hussein To 9/11
Bush ‘wrestled’ with decision to invade Iraq
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...-12-2005_pg4_5
(Gold9472: Then why did I have to make this?)
12/18/2005
WASHINGTON: President George W Bush said on Friday that he wrestled for months over the decision to go to war in Iraq but that he remains convinced it was the right decision.
In the latest in a series of comments in which he has gone further than in the past to acknowledge heated debate over the war, Bush told PBS in an interview that he never tried to guess casualty numbers before the March 2003 invasion but said he understood the risks. “I’ll never forget making the decision in the Situation Room, and it affected me,” he was quoted as saying in the transcript of the interview for “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.”
“I got up out of the chair and walked around the South Lawn there and I thought, you know, I knew the decision I had just made - by the way, that I had been wrestling with for months - was the right decision,” Bush said.
Senior US officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, had also warned before the war of possible links between Hussein’s government and the planners of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Bush acknowledged on Friday there was no evidence of such a link. “There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11,” Bush said. “I’ve never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq.” But he added that he believed the two issues were related even in the absence of direct ties.
“I think they are related in the war on terror because he (Saddam) had terrorist connections. Again, he was a sworn enemy and he’d had weapons of mass destruction, had used them,” Bush said. Bush will tell Americans on Sunday in an Oval Office address that the US mission in Iraq has entered a critical period in the aftermath of Iraq’s election, the White House said on Friday. The White House scheduled the speech at 9 p.m. EST on Sunday (0100 GMT Monday) and asked the US television networks to carry the speech live.
