In his most casual acknowledgment, Bush said at the Pentagon that the cost of the war – in lives and money – had been higher than he had anticipated.
But he remained unwavering in his insistence that the invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003, had made the world better and the US safer.
“Five years into this battle, there is an understandable debate over whether the war was worth fighting,” he said. “The answers are clear to me. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight that America can and must win,” he explained. The anniversary, as it has in the past, galvanised the war’s critics and to a lesser degree, its supporters. Raucous protests erupted in Washington and in other cities, leading to dozens of arrests.
Bush also said he had made no decision to hasten withdrawals. “Any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders,” he said.
Bush’s Pentagon speech will be his last address as a President on the anniversary, and he reflected at length on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the rise of the insurgency, the lurch toward civil war and the decision to send more troops.
“The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat,” he said.
Anti-war protests
More than 200 people were arrested across the United States as protesters marking the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq obstructed downtown traffic and tried to block access to government offices. There were 32 arrests in Washington after demonstrators attempted to block entrances to the Internal Revenue Service, while 30 others were arrested outside a congressional office building, police said.
Protesters had hoped to shut down the IRS, the US tax collection agency, to highlight the cost of the war. Police cleared the building’s entrances within an hour.
In San Francisco, long a centre of anti-Iraq war sentiment, police arrested more than 100 people who protested through the day along Market Street in the central business district, a spokesman said. Five people tried to block a military recruitment centre in Boston.
People in the streets say the protests were like those of the Vietnam war era, when everybody from all the states in the US met in a single staging point – Washington – and marched on.
