Bush says Abu Ghraib was biggest mistake of Iraq war - President George W. Bush said Thursday that the Abu Ghraib p...

original

Bush says Abu Ghraib was biggest mistake of Iraq war



WASHINGTON, May 25, 2006 (AFP) - President George W. Bush said Thursday that the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was the "biggest mistake" made by the United States in Iraq.

Speaking after a summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush said "I think the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement, is Abu Ghraib.

"We've been paying for that for a long period of time," Bush told a joint White House news conference.

The Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal broke with the release of photos of Iraqi prisoners being mistreated and sexually humiliated at the prison outside Baghdad and drew international criticism.

Bush said he also regretted some of his tough talk during the war campaign such as his "bring them on" challenge to Iraqi insurgents in July 2003, four months after the US-led invasion.

In an unusually candid assessment of the Iraq war, which has sent his popularity ratings plunging, Bush strongly defended the operation but acknowledged "setbacks and missteps."

"Not everything since liberation has turned out the way we had expected or hoped," he said.

"We've learned from our mistakes, adjusted our methods and built on our successes, from changing the way we train the Iraqi security forces to rethinking the way we do reconstruction."

Blair said the US-led forces misread the problems they would face in Iraq after the move to overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein.

"I think inevitably some of the things that we thought were going to be the biggest challenge proved not to be, and some of the things we didn't expect to be challenges at all have proved to be immense," he said.

But he expressed specific regret over the wholesale exclusion of members of Saddam's Baath Party from leadership roles in the post-invasion US occupation.

"I think that probably in retrospect, though at the time it was very difficult to argue this, we could have done de-Baathification in a more differentiated way than we did," Blair said.