Bush, Blair: Misstesps in Iraq

Bush said the "biggest mistake" for the United States was the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which guards photographed themselves sexually tormenting Iraqi prisoners, spawning revulsion worldwide. "We've been paying for that for a long period of time."

Blair said he and Bush should have recognized that the fall of president Saddam Hussein would not "be the rise of a democratic Iraq, that it was going to be a more difficult process" because "you're talking about literally building the institutions of a state from scratch."

While Bush increasingly has begun to acknowledge missteps in handling the war, his comments last night -- together with Blair's -- represent his most explicit acknowledgment that the administration underestimated the difficulty of the central project of his presidency.

Blair cited the process of "de-Baathification" that immediately followed the overthrow of the old government. Many analysts say that decision to remove all of Hussein's loyalists fueled the insurgency because it threw tens of thousands of Iraqis out of work and left an administrative vacuum, and Blair agreed that it should have been done "in a more differentiated way."

Well, and what's next? I'd like to quote here Thomas L. Friedman, "As long as I see Iraqis ready to take a stand for their country, I think we have to stand with them." It means Standing By Stand-Up Iraqis

(Washington Post, New York Times)