Skip to main content

Bush Says Failure in Iraq 'Not an Option'

President Bush said Wednesday he didn't expect to get universal support at home for the decision to invade Iraq and said failure there ``is not an option.''

Bush, speaking to reporters on the White House South Lawn after a meeting with a group of governors who returned from a visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, thanked the state chief executives for ``sending a message from home that we care ... we appreciate the fact that people are willing to make sacrifices.''

``I assured them that our goal in Afghanistan and Iraq is victory and there will be a victory'' when those two countries are able to sustain themselves and defend themselves,'' he said. ``I assured the governors that the United States will complete the mission.''

``I fully recognize that the Iaqis must step up and form a unity govenment so that those who went to the polls will recognize'' that they'll have a government that responds to their needs, he said.

``We understand very well that the political process in Iraq must occur very soon,'' the president added. ``I don't expect everybody to agree with my decision to go into Iraq. But I want the American people to understand that failure in Iraq is not an option'' and that success there will ``begin to lay the foundation for a peace'' that will last for generations.

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said he was heartened by what he saw there, and said that ``every thing that can be done is being done a daily basis'' by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Daniels said the commitment to the mission in Iraq ``is unanimous. They believe they're doing something important.''

West Va. Gov. Joe Machin said the troops there are ``committed to getting the job done ... It was so good to see them in high spirits.''

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

US says world safer, despite 11,000 attacks in '05

The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department's counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people. The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year. But the new 2005 figures, which showed attacks in Iraq jumped and accounted for about a third of the world's total, may fuel criticism of the Bush administration's assertion that it is winning the fight against terrorism. Asked if the world was safer than the previous year, U.S. State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Henry Crumpton told a news conference, "I think so. But I think that (if) you look at the ups and downs of this battle, it's going to take us a long time to win this. You can't measure this month ...

Al-Qaeda number two in new video

Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has appeared in a video saying that Iraqi insurgents have "broken the back" of the US military. He praised "martyrdom operations" carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq in the video, posted on an Islamist website. And he called on the people and army of Pakistan to fight against President Musharraf's administration. This is the third message from prominent al-Qaeda leaders to emerge within a week. A tape from Osama Bin Laden was broadcast on 23 April, followed two days later by a message from Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Pakistan focus Zawahiri, who wore a black turban and a white robe in the video, described the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq as traitors, and urged Muslims to "confront them". He praised Iraqi militants, saying that the US, Britain and allies had "achieved nothing but losses, disasters and misfortunes" in Iraq. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq alone has carried out 800 ma...

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...