http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11959710/We begin tonight with HARDBALL’s David Shuster and this report on the president’s news conference.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID SHUSTER, HARDBALL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Bannered by the war in Iraq and facing the worst approval numbers since Richard Nixon, today President Bush nonetheless vowed to keep U.S. forces in the fight.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I’m going to say it again. If I didn’t believe we could succeed, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t put those kids there.
SHUSTER: The president said the U.S. is making progress in Iraq and suggested these images from recent weeks do not tell the whole story.
BUSH: Listen, we all recognize that there is violence, that there’s sectarian violence, but the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war.
SHUSTER: Many Iraq leaders say the president has it wrong, including Iraq’s former prime minister.
AYAD ALLAWI, FORMER INTERIM IRAQI PRIME MINISTER: This is, in fact, as a level of a civil war. We should not deny that.
SHUSTER: But regardless of what anybody calls Iraq, the latest NBC News/”Wall Street Journal” poll shows 57 percent of the American people have lost confidence in the war, and the president’s approval rating has dropped to 37 percent.
The White House strategy is clearly to shift attention from an unpopular policy to the press. Today, the president alleged that American television organizations, by showing the violence in Iraq, are playing into the hands of Iraq’s insurgents.
BUSH: You said, how I react to a bombing that took place yesterday. It’s precisely what the enemy understands is possible to do. They’re capable of blowing up innocent life so it ends up on your TV show.
SHUSTER: In another attempt to change the topic from the war to the media ...
BUSH: Helen.
SHUSTER: ... the president for the first time in four years responded to a question from veteran columnist and war critic Helen Thomas. She asked a fundamental question: Why did the president lead the nation into war?
HELEN THOMAS, HEARST NEWSPAPERS: What was your real reason? You have said it wasn’t oil, a quest for oil. It hasn’t been Israel or anything else. What was it?
BUSH: I think your premise, in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist, is that, you know, I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen. Excuse me. Excuse me. No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it’s just simply not true.
SHUSTER: The strategy of welcoming sharp questions is a change for this White House, which until six months ago usually kept the president in front of friendly audiences. The president does excel at fraternity style teasing, like when he towel-snapped a “New York Times” reporter.
BUSH: Elizabeth was half asleep. Yes, you were.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was not.
BUSH: OK. Well the person next to you was.
SHUSTER: But jousting with skeptics day after day carries a risk and in Cleveland on Monday, the president opened himself up to charges of historical revisionism, with an audience member questioned him about his original claims for war.
QUESTION: Weapons of mass destruction, the claim that Iraq was sponsoring terrorists who would have attacked us on 9/11, and that Iraq had purchased nuclear materials from Niger—all three of those turned out to be false.
BUSH: I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.
SHUSTER: But history shows the president did link Saddam with those who were responsible. Here’s what he said in 2002.
BUSH: The war on terror is—you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam with you talk about the war on terror.
He’s a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda.
We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.
SHUSTER: Vice President Cheney claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic in April 2001.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: As well, you have said in the past that it was, quote, “pretty well confirmed.”
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I never said that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK, I think that is ...
CHENEY: That’s absolutely not.
SHUSTER: But Cheney was captured on videotape almost three years before that interview, just a few months after 9/11, saying exactly that, the very thing he denied saying to the reporter.
CHENEY: It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
SHUSTER: More contradictory still, on the eve of the Iraq war, the White House in a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that force was authorized against those who, quote, “aided the 9/11 attacks.”
In any case, both the president and vice president are presenting themselves as upbeat and seemingly unworried about their credibility problems. Though the violence in Iraq has gotten worse if recent months, the vice president said today ...
CHENEY: Progress has not come easily, but it has been steady.
SHUSTER: And President Bush added at his news conference ...
BUSH: We’re making progress because we’ve got a strategy for victory.
SHUSTER (on camera): The problem for the White House is the public is increasingly convinced that just because the Bush administration argues it has a plan doesn’t mean it will be carried out well or accomplished, and today President Bush acknowledged that a decision about a withdrawal from the U.S. forces may be left to his successor, the strongest declaration so far that U.S. troops will likely be staying in Iraq through early 2009.
I’m David Shuster for HARDBALL, at the White House.
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