Bush 'wrestled with decision' to invade Iraq

WASHINGTON - President George W Bush said today that he wrestled for months over the decision to go to war in Iraq but that he remains convinced it was the right decision.

In the latest in a series of comments in which he has gone further than in the past to acknowledge heated debate over the war, Bush told PBS in an interview that he never tried to guess casualty numbers before the March 2003 invasion but said he understood the risks.

"I'll never forget making the decision in the Situation Room, and it affected me," he was quoted as saying in the transcript of the interview for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. "I got up out of the chair and walked around the South Lawn there and I thought, you know, I knew the decision I had just made -- by the way, that I had been wrestling with for months -- was the right decision," Bush said.

Bush, in a speech on Thursday, took the blame for going to war over faulty intelligence but said he was right to topple Saddam Hussein and urged Americans to be patient.

The Bush administration had emphasized the threat of weapons of mass destruction as a reason to go to war in Iraq but such weapons were never found.

Senior US officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, had also warned before the war of possible links between Hussein's government and the planners of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Bush acknowledged there was no evidence of such a link.

"There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11," Bush said. "I've never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq." But he added that he believed the two issues were related even in the absence of direct ties.

"I think they are related in the war on terror because he (Saddam) had terrorist connections. Again, he was a sworn enemy and he'd had weapons of mass destruction, had used them," Bush said.

- REUTERS