It depends on what the meaning of ‘welcome’ is

December 13, 2005

NBC’s Brian Williams posed a pretty good question to Bush yesterday afternoon, presenting the president with a handful of his pre-war assumptions and asking if they proved to be right or wrong. I was particularly fond of the first one — and Bush’s response.

Williams: A lot of people have seen in this series of speeches you’re giving on Iraq, a movement in your position. They call it an acknowledgement that perhaps the mission has not gone as it was originally planned — three points: That the U.S. would be welcomed as liberators, that General Shinsecki, when he said this would take hundreds of thousands of troops in his farewell speech, might have been right. And third, that it wasn’t a self-sustaining war in terms of the oil revenue. Do you concede those three points might not have gone as planned?

President Bush: Review them with me again.

Williams: Number one — that we’d be welcomed as liberators?

President Bush: I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome.

That has to be one of the more remarkable Bush quotes I’ve seen in a long while.

Kind of like “catastrophic success.”

I hope Bush keeps on coming out with this idiotic mumbo-jumbo. It can’t help his poll numbers.

  • Off Topic – but later in the speech, Bush appears to contradict his stated desire for “Strict constructionist” judges when he notes that the Constitution is a living document.

    Williams: Have you ever entertained the thought, Mr. President, that Iraq’s natural state may be three separate pieces, three separate nations?

    President Bush: No, I haven’t. I think — I know it will be united based upon, you know, kind of universal principles, the ones I outlined in the speech, freedom to worship, rule of law, private property, marketplace, all bound by a constitution which the Iraqis approved, and which the Iraqis will improve upon. And, you know, we improved on our own Constitution. In other words, it’s a living document. And no, that would be a disaster, by the way, if it were three separate nations.

  • And the Japanese welcomed us to Iwo Jima and Okinawa and Custer was welcomed to the Little Big Horm

  • I think it’s clear that what Bush really said was, “I’m President and I get to do whatever I want.”

  • To be fair, that’s a borderline out-of-context quote. The whole quote from the linked article is this:

    “I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome. There were some in society, rejectionists and the Saddamists and the terrorists that have moved in to stir them up that said, “We’re going to prevent a democracy from emerging.” But I think a lot of people are glad, I know a lot of people are glad we’re there. And they’re glad we’re helping them train their troops so they can take the fight.”

  • I think it would be more interesting to have a discussion on some other points of the interview, such as the following answer:

    “Remember at the time we didn’t know the facts on the ground. We — everybody thought the guy had weapons of mass destruction. Everybody knew that he’d used weapons of mass destruction and had provided safe haven for terrorists. I mean, those were facts. Whether or not it had to happen is — it didn’t have to happen since a human being made the decision. Whether or not it needed to happen, I’m still convinced it needed to happen.”

    No, everybody did not think he had WMDs, quite the opposite, everybody thought Bush was trumping up the evidence. It was obvious from the reports even before the war. I for one never believed Saddam had anything. The weapons inspectors kept saying they couldn’t find anything, and that Saddam was largely cooperative with them. The CIA didn’t believe he had anything, with the one exception of Tenet’s “slam-dunk” that seemed entirely unsupported by the evidence the CIA had. Bush cherry-picked the evidence to support what he wanted to do. Now he’s playing revisionist history, changing “I created faulty evidence that Saddam had WMDs and catapulted the propaganda” to “Everyone knew he had weapons”.

  • You know, (I’m just rambling now,) the stupid thing of all this is I would have totally supported the war if Bush handn’t lied and hadn’t alienated the international community but instead said we needed to do this to resolve a stalemate that’s been killing Iraqis for years and letting Saddam continue to slaughter them, said it would take an overwhelming force to do it, asked for and arm-twisted to get the world to go along (because, IMO, they would have went along as long as we didn’t twist too hard) to help the war and reconstruction efforts to succeed and establish credibility with Iraqis. I don’t know if the rest of the US feels the same way, but I would have gone along with that. If Bush hadn’t started out lying his way into this war, he wouldn’t be stuck lying to us now. (Though we might still have the incompetence issues.)

  • It was not a peaceful welcome??? At least their welcome is in its “last throes”. Then we will have to say our “fond fare-not-wells” before we are bid “mal voyage”.

  • “No, everybody did not think he had WMDs, quite the opposite, everybody thought Bush was trumping up the evidence. It was obvious from the reports even before the war. I for one never believed Saddam had anything. The weapons inspectors kept saying they couldn’t find anything, and that Saddam was largely cooperative with them.” — Rian Mueller

    Ah!, but from Bush’s perspective, what counts is what everybody ‘believed’ when Congress authorized him to use force. In the Bush reality-challenged beliefs, the only ‘rationale’ response to the inspectors not finding WMD was that Saddam was a masterful hider of things (or maybe he shipped them to Syria, which kind of ignored the fact that the Syrian Baathists hated the Iraqi Baathists). So the more the inspectors did not find stuff, the stronger the proof that Saddam had to be removed from power because of how clever he was at hiding it !!!!!

    So you see, YOUR not believing in WMD because the inspectors were not finding it just shows your gullability and after 9/11, Bush certainly could not follow the advice of a person such as yourself (tongue firmly planted in cheek).

    😉

  • “Everybody knew that he’d used weapons of mass destruction and had provided safe haven for terrorists. I mean, those were facts. Whether or not it had to happen is — it didn’t have to happen since a human being made the decision. Whether or not it needed to happen, I’m still convinced it needed to happen.”

    This is the president of the U.S. of A.????

    First we had Casey Stengel (remember the old perfessor?).
    Then we had Yogi Berra. Now this? But the first two guys
    were winners, and actually made some sense, e.g. nobody
    goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.

    But I can’t figure out the mush that is going on inside
    this guy’s head. This is embarrassing, for Chris
    sakes. The rest of the world is watching and laughing
    at us retards who voted for this imbecile not once
    but twice.

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