Q It’s been reported that President Bush, in an Oval Office meeting last week, when he was talking about his Iraq policy, said, “I’ll be dead when they get it right.” In other words, that basically —
MR. SNOW: I don’t remember that.
Q Well, he basically seems to be saying that he never changed his policy one jot. Can you confirm that he said that?
MR. SNOW: No, I can’t, because I didn’t — I would have written down a line like that, because I keep pretty copious notes.
Q Can you confirm Holden he did not say that?
MR. SNOW: I don’t want to confirm or deny, I just don’t know. Let me put it this way — it doesn’t sound like something he would have said. But I did not hear it, and I cannot tell you, because I don’t know — even know what meaning they’re referring to.
Let me put it this way: The President is determined
— he understands that, number one, the war on terror is going to be a long war; number two, it is important to create an Iraq that can sustain, govern and defend itself. And we are working with all our ingenuity and our might to try to support that government and to come up with the right set of policies. If you’re talking about he’s going to be dead before they get it right in Iraq, again, that does not —
Q He’s going to be dead before people get it right, in terms of understanding that he was right with his policies.
MR. SNOW: Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I think what the President is talking about there — that’s completely different than what I thought you were asking. Who knows? I mean, I think the President feels — it doesn’t mean that he’s not changing. It means that the President has been steadfast in defending and discussing the goal of an Iraq that can defend, sustain and govern itself, to be an ally in the war on terror, and also his analysis of the war on terror — that you have a totalitarian movement that is designed not merely to crush human freedom, but also to extend its control over a large area, ranging from Micronesia to Northern Africa; and that it’s important to resist that, and to do so in what one might consider the early stages, even though al Qaeda has been gathering strength for more than two decades, because it is important to advance the cause of freedom.
[snip]
He may have said that it may take some time for people to understand that he was right in viewing it in that way. That would not be unusual. As you know, the President often talks about the fact that last year he had — he read three new biographies of George Washington, who had been dead at the time for more than 200 years. So the fact is that — he certainly stands by his analysis of the situation, but also understands that the tactics that have been employed right now are not doing the job, and there needs to be a better way forward.
