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They fumbled the execution.
There's people that were around Iraq saying, Well, I think he may come back. And that obviously is not going to happen.
Well, the message is that it's a confusing message.
It just goes to show that this is a government that has still got some maturation to do.
Because otherwise, the violence - in my judgment, and I think in the judgment of others - if we don't help them stop it, it's going to get a lot worse, believe it or not.
Look, death is terrible.
It's going to be hard to make Baghdad zero - to make it bomb-proof.
If you were to take it and put me in an opinion poll and said do I approve of Iraq, I'd be one of those that said, no, I don't approve of what's taking place in Iraq.
No question, 2006 was a lousy year for Iraq.
So success is measurable; it's definable; and last year was a year in which there was a setback to success.
Part of the failure for our reaction was ourselves.
And what's going to change this time is that they've now - we will watch them move brigades in that Baghdad - brigades that they promised they would.
I don't quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg -- that -- where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg. If I didn't believe we could keep the egg from fully cracking, I wouldn't ask 21,000 kids - additional kids to go into Iraq to reinforce those troops that are there.
Their order was countermanded by Iraqi politicians - in other words, you need to go get this guy in a particular neighborhood, and they would be moving in toward him, and then the Iraqis would pull - say, well, we'd better not make that move right now, we'd better - it may be too much politics.
It's a - at some point in time, you know, the president - you listen to all the different points of view.
I've spent a lot of time during my presidency talking to the American people and educating the American people about the stakes and what we're trying to get done.
I'd love for Democrats and Republicans to stand behind me in the Rose Garden as I outline the plan.
When you throw a nuclear weapon race in the midst of this, you've got a - you know, a kind of - a chance for radicals to use weapons of mass destruction in a form that would cause huge devastation.
And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life's moving on, that they're able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table.
The very same guys - type of guys that flew those airplanes on September 11th are still the ones that are battling against a young democracy in Iraq.
And I spent a lot of time thinking about it, Jim, obviously. This is what presidents do; they take time, they listen. I listened to a lot of folks, a lot of good, decent folks, and came up with this answer as the best way to succeed.
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