US President Bush on Friday conceded for the first time that he had "miscalculated" the post-war situation in Iraq, but insisted that US strategy was flexible enough to deal with the insurgency.
The admission, in an interview with the New York Times, made news because Bush is not given to revisiting his decisions. Asked in April if he had made mistakes in office, he was unable to think of any.
However, a report on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, released this week, put some of the blame for the "chaos" at the Iraqi prison on the administration's failure to prepare adequately for an insurgency. The report, by James Schlesinger, a conservative Republican and former secretary of defense, said the Pentagon's war plans had assumed a "benign" postwar environment.
In his interview, Bush said he had made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in postwar Iraq. But he said that was the result of the "swift victory" against the Iraqi army, which collapsed so fast that it was able to melt away and stage a guerrilla insurgency.
Ivo Daalder, a former member of former US president Bill Clinton's National Security Council and now an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said Bush's remarks showed "a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation."
"If the Iraqi defenses fell quicker, we should have more troops in Baghdad. Had they had more troops there, they would have been able to deal with the insurgency more quickly and effectively," Daalder said. "This was not miscalculation. This was ignoring military advice."
Bush again refused to condemn a political advertisement by right-wing ex-soldiers -- the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- who claim that Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry lied about his war record.
Instead, he repeated his earlier call for all advertising by such non-party groups to be banned. But Bush made it clear he did not agree with the ad's central message.
"I think Senator Kerry should be proud of his record," he said. "No, I don't think he lied."
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