Once again ...President Confusalum Bush
dishes out his revisionist claptrap....
Bush, Amid New Unrest, Says World Safer Without Saddam
56 minutes ago Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Steve Holland and Fiona O'Brien
WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites), saying the world was a safer place without Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), sought on Saturday to justify his war with Iraq (news - web sites) to the American people.
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His weekly radio broadcast came amid continuing unrest in Iraq, with a guerrilla rocket attack on a Baghdad hotel housing officials in the U.S.-led administration and Iraqi police saying American soldiers had killed four more civilians.
"The world is safer today because, in Iraq, our coalition ended a regime that cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction," Bush said.
It was a tough week for the American leader, and for his staunch British ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites).
Bush's appeal at the United Nations (news - web sites) for foreign troops and cash to bolster security and reconstruction in Iraq met a cool response, and in Washington members of Congress raised concerns over a multibillion-dollar bill for the Middle East nation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) said after talks with Bush at his Camp David retreat outside Washington that Moscow would wait for details of a proposed U.S. resolution to the United Nations before deciding on participation in Iraq's reconstruction.
In another blow for Bush and Blair, U.S. officials said an interim report was expected to say no conclusive evidence had been found that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction -- the key claim Washington and London used for going to war in March.
Blair's standing in opinion polls has plummeted -- like Bush -- amid questions of his reasons for war.
Blair's inner circle has also been hit by a judicial inquiry into responsibility for the suicide of one of the nation's top weapons experts on Iraq, Dr David Kelly, which cast an unprecedented light on the inner workings of government.
80 U.S. DEAD IN ACTION
The United States currently has around 130,000 troops and Britain around 20,000 in Iraq, but the security situation remains fraught. Some 80 American troops have died in action and many have been wounded since Bush declared major war over in Iraq on May 1.
The turmoil fueled protests on Saturday in cities around the world, with demonstrators calling for an end to the U.S.-led occupation.
In Iraq, U.S. and British soldiers have struggled to bring stability for the country's 26 million people. Washington activated 10,000 National Guard troops on Friday for Iraq duty and put another 5,000 on standby.
People living near the Rasheed Hotel, part of a compound on the west bank of the Tigris river which the U.S.-led administration has taken over, said they were woken by three thunderous bangs at dawn on Saturday.
U.S. military spokesman Colonel William Darley said guerrillas fired at the hotel with a multiple rocket launcher powered by a car battery. There were no casualties.
"Three of them successfully fired, and they did strike the building," he told a news conference. He said the incident fit a pattern of increasing guerrilla attacks on "soft targets" rather than on heavily armed American military units.
In Falluja, west of Baghdad, police said three men and a woman from the same family were killed when U.S. soldiers fired at their car on a road just outside the town late on Friday.
U.S. forces said they were shot at first and that two Iraqis were killed in return fire in the incident. Falluja is about 30 miles from Baghdad, in the so-called Sunni Triangle where resistance to the occupation is strongest.
Chanting "America is the enemy of God" and vowing revenge, angry residents flocked to a nearby hospital where Reuters television footage showed four corpses and several wounded, including a young girl. |
