Remember this from 4 years ago, during the 2nd presidential debate?
GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.
BUSH: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you never heard of, and some of them big.
And in a war, there’s a lot of — there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say: He shouldn’t have done that. He shouldn’t have made that decision. And I’ll take responsibility for them. I’m human.
But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions, because I think they’re right.
That’s really what you’re — when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is, “Absolutely not.” It was the right decision.
Four years later, we get this, per CNN:
Bush did say he had some regrets about his presidency, including “saying some things I shouldn’t have said.”
Asked for an example, the president said, “Like, dead or alive, bring them on,” which he said about the insurgents in Iraq.
“I was trying to convey a message. I probably could have conveyed it more artfully,” said Bush, who was interviewed aboard the USS Intrepid docked in New York for a Veterans Day observance.
“Being on this ship reminds me of when I went to the USS Abraham Lincoln and they had a sign that said ‘Mission Accomplished.’ I regret that that sign was there,” Bush added.
Wait a second, didn’t “Bring ‘em on” and “Mission Accomplished” happen well before the 2004 presidential election? Today’s CNN interview just serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the Bush years and all that they have entailed: a complete lack of competent governance and an unwillingness to understand the complexities of the dangerous world that we live in. If anything, this long-awaited-for expression of regret by the current President, while fully welcomed, is a slap in the face to those like John Kerry who were expressing their dissent against our Iraq policy back when it wasn’t popular to do so. I’m so glad we’re 70 days away from the final end to this national nightmare.
