Bush, blowing through political capital like a crackwhore in an opium den.
QUESTION: Iraq's interim prime minister said Sunday that, "Violence is killing an average of 50 to 60 people a day and that if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."Posted by kerry at March 21, 2006 09:13 AMQUESTION: Do you agree with Mr. Allawi that Iraq has fallen into civil war?
BUSH: I do not. There are other voices coming out of Iraq, by the way, other than Mr. Allawi -- who I know, by the way; like; he's a good fellow.
President Talabani has spoken. General Casey the other day was quite eloquent on the subject. Zal Khalilzad, who I talk to quite frequently -- listen, we all recognize that there is a violence, that there's sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war.
(...)
But I believe the Iraqis -- this is a moment when the Iraqis had a chance to fall apart and they didn't. And that's a positive development.
That's nice of Bush to say he likes Allawi, but next time the guy mouths off, it'll be "No, I don't--I don't really know him...I don't recall ever meeting or speaking with him. What? He was the, the interim prime minister? Well, you know, I--I meet with thousands of prime ministers day in and day out, shake hands with them, get my photo taken with them, mouth a few platitudes--that's what presidents do. Maybe he was on the White House Christmas card mailing list or something, I dunno. But you know, that doesn't really matter--I don't want to get into playing the blame game here or talk about who knows who or who said what or who's telling the truth or not, it's just a distraction from the real story here, which is our ongoing success of our mission to bring peace and freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq and fight the terrrists over there so we don't have to fight them over here, and we look forward to working with the real prime minister to, to, to make Iraq a safer place. 'Cause it's hard work."
Posted by: Peter Dubuque at March 21, 2006 11:14 AM