US: President George W Bush has accepted responsibility for going to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence but defended his decision as acting in America's national security interest.
In his fourth speech on Iraq in two weeks, Mr Bush hailed today's elections as a watershed for democracy in the Middle East and promised that US troops would stay in Iraq until they achieved complete victory.
"Given Saddam's history and the lessons of September the 11th, my decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision," he said yesterday. "Saddam was a threat - and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power.
"We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator; it is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in its place."
Mr Bush said that before the invasion, Saddam had been using the United Nations oil-for-food programme to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions, with the intent of restarting weapons programmes once the sanctions collapsed. But in a rare acknowledgment of error, he admitted that US intelligence claims about Iraq's weapons programmes had been wrong.
"When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction . . . and it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," he said.
"As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq and I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities."
Support for the war among the American public has risen by 5 per cent in the past two weeks but half of the country still believes Mr Bush was wrong to invade Iraq.
Democrats are divided, with some calling for a withdrawal of US troops as soon as possible while others, including senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, argue that the US should stay until Iraqi forces can take over more security duties.
Mr Bush said setting a deadline for withdrawal would be "a disaster" and he accused his Democratic critics of undermining the morale of soldiers in the field.
"Whatever our differences in Washington, our men and women in uniform deserve to know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm's way, our support will be with them in good days and bad, and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory."
Reuters adds: Tough security and an informal rebel truce stifled all but sporadic violence in Iraq yesterday. General calm was punctuated only by a few attacks concentrated in northern Iraq and protests by religious Shias against a perceived insult to their spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on al-Jazeera television.