April 29, 2003

Following is a full transcript from a speech about Iraq by
President Bush yesterday in Dearborn, Mich., as transcribed
by Federal News Service Inc.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you for that warm welcome. I'm glad
to be here. I regret that I wasn't here a few weeks ago
when the statue came down. (Applause.)

I understand you had quite a party. (LAUGHTER) I don't
blame you. A lot of the people in the Detroit area had
waited years for that great day. Many Iraqi-Americans know
the horrors of Saddam Hussein's regime first hand. You also
know the joys of freedom you have found here in America.
(Applause.)

You are living proof the Iraqi people love freedom and
living proof the Iraqi people can flourish in democracy.
People who live in Iraq deserve the same freedom that you
and I enjoy here in America. (Applause.) And after years of
tyranny and torture, that freedom has finally arrived.
(Applause.)

I have confidence in the future of a free Iraq. The Iraqi
people are fully capable of self-government. Every day
Iraqis are moving toward democracy and embracing the
responsibilities of active citizenship. Every day life in
Iraq improves as coalition troops work to secure unsafe
areas and bring food and medical care to those in need.

America pledged to rid Iraq of an oppressive regime, and we
kept our word. America now... (Applause.) America now
pledges to help Iraqis build a prosperous and peaceful
nation, and we will keep our word again. (Applause.)

Mr. Mayor, thanks. I appreciate you greeting me once again
here in Dearborn. I appreciate your leadership. If you got
any problems with the garbage or the potholes, call the
mayor. (LAUGHTER)

I want to thank members of the congressional delegation who
have joined us today. Thank you all for coming. Michigan is
well represented in the halls of the United States
Congress. (Applause.)

I want to thank the folks from the state government who
have joined us today and local governments. I appreciate so
very much the CEOs of the major automobile manufacturing
companies who are based here in Detroit who are here, Rick
Wagoner, Bill Ford and Dieter Zetsche. Thank you all for
coming. Look forward to discussing things with you later.
(Applause.)

Right before I came in here I had the opportunity to meet
with some extraordinary men and women, our fellow
Americans, who knew the cruelties of the old Iraq. And like
me, they believe deeply in the promise of a new Iraq.

I spoke with Najda Igaili (ph), a Sunni Muslim from Basra,
who moved to the United States five years ago. Najda (ph)
learned the price of dissent in Iraq in 1988 when her
brother-in-law was killed after laughing at a joke about
Saddam Hussein in a house that was bugged.

"In Iraq," Najda (ph) says, "we could never speak to anyone
about Saddam Hussein. We had to make sure the windows were
closed." (Applause.) The windows are now open in Iraq.
(Applause.) Najda (ph) and her friends will never forget
seeing the images of liberation in Baghdad. Here's what she
said. "We called each other, and we were shouting. We never
believed that Saddam Hussein would be gone."

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He's gone! (Laughter, applause.)

PRESIDENT BUSH: Like Najah (sp), a lot of Iraqis, a lot of
Iraqis feared the dictator, the tyrant, would never go
away. You're right, he's gone. (Extended applause, cheers.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because of you, Mr. President, because of
you --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The whole country is behind you, just keep
going! (Laughter, applause.)

PRESIDENT BUSH: (Chuckles.) We love free speech in America!
(Laughter, cheers, applause.)

I talked to Tariq Daoud (ph), a Catholic from Basra who now
lives in Bloomfield Hills. (Applause.)

When the dictator regime fell here's what Tariq (ph) said,
he said, "I am more hopeful today than I've ever been since
1958. We need to take the little children in Iraq and hold
their hands and really teach them what freedom is all
about." He says the new generation could really make
democracy work.

He's right to be optimistic. From the beginning of this
conflict we have seen brave Iraqi citizens taking part in
their own liberation. Iraqis have warned our troops about
land mines and enemy hideouts and military arsenals.
Earlier this month Iraqis helped Marines locate the seven
American prisoners of war who were then rescued in northern
Iraq. (Applause.)

One courageous Iraqi man gave Marines detailed layouts of a
hospital in An Nasiriyah which led to the rescue of
American soldier Jessica Lynch. (Applause.)

Iraqi citizens are now working closely with our troops to
restore order to their cities and improve the life of their
nation. In Basra hundreds of police volunteers have joined
with coalition forces to patrol the streets.

In Baghdad more than a thousand citizens are doing joint
patrols with coalition troops, and residents are also
working with coalition troops to collect unexploded
munitions from neighborhoods and repair the telephone
system. People are working to improve the lives of the
average citizens in Iraq. (Applause.)

I want you to listen to what an Iraqi engineer said who was
working with U.S. Army engineers to restore power to
Baghdad. He said, "We are very glad to work with the
Americans to have power for the facilities. The Americans
are working to help us." (Applause.)

Iraqi-Americans, including some from Michigan, are building
bridges between our troops and Iraqi civilians.

Members of the Free Iraqi Forces are serving as translators
for our troops and are delivering humanitarian aid to the
citizens.

One of these volunteers, an Iraqi-American who fled Saddam
Hussein's regime in 1991, recently returned to his homeland
with the 101st Airborne Division. A few weeks ago, when he
first say the cheering crowds of Iraqis welcome coalition
troops in Hilla, he wept.

He said, "People could hardly believe what was happening."
And he told them, "Believe it; liberation is coming."
(Applause.)

Yes, there were some in our country who doubted the Iraqi
people wanted freedom or they just couldn't imagine they
would be welcoming to a liberating force. They were
mistaken, and we know why. The desire for freedom is not
the property of one culture. It is the universal hope of
human beings in every culture. (Applause.)

Whether you're Sunni or Shi'a or Kurd or Chaldean or
Assyrian or Turkemen or Christian or Jew or Muslim.
(Applause.) No matter what your faith, freedom is God's
gift to every person in every nation. (Applause.)

As freedom takes hold in Iraq, the Iraqi people will choose
their own leaders and their own government. America has no
intention of imposing our form of government or our
culture. Yet, we will ensure that all Iraqis have a voice
in the new government and all citizens have their rights
protected. (Applause.)

In the city of An Nasiriyah, where free Iraqis met recently
to discuss the political future of their country, they
issued a statement beginning with these words: Iraq must be
democratic. (Applause.)

That historic declaration expresses the commitment of the
Iraqi people, and their friends the American people. The
days of repression from any source are over. Iraq will be
democratic. (Applause.)

The work of building a new Iraq will take time. That nation
is recovering not just from weeks of conflict, but from
decades of totalitarian rule. In a nation where the
dictator treated himself to palaces with gold faucets and
grand fountains, four out of ten citizens did not even have
clean water to drink.

While the former regime exported milk and dates and corn
and grain for its own profit, more than half a million
Iraqi children were malnourished.

As Saddam Hussein let more than $200 million worth of
medicine and medical supplies sit in warehouses, one in
eight Iraqi children were dying before the age of five. And
while the dictator spent billions on weapons, including
gold-covered AK-47s, nearly a quarter of Iraqi children
were born underweight.

Saddam Hussein's regime impoverished the Iraqi people in
every way. Today Iraq has only about half as many hospitals
as it had in 1990. Seventy percent of the schools are run
down and overcrowded. A quarter of the Iraqi children are
not in school at all. Under Saddam's regime, the Iraqi
people did not have a power system they could depend on.

These problems plagued Iraq long before the recent
conflict. We're helping the Iraqi people to address these
challenges, and we will stand with them as they defeat the
dictator's legacy. (Applause.)

Right now engineers are on the ground working with Iraqi
experts to restore power and fix broken water pipes in
Baghdad and other cities. We're working with the
International Red Cross, the Red Crescent Societies, the
International Medical Corps and other aid agencies to help
Iraqi hospitals get safe water and medical supplies and
reliable electricity.

Our coalition is cooperating with the United Nations to
help restart the ration distribution system that provides
food at thousands of sites in Iraq. And coalition medical
facilities have treated Iraqis from everything from
fractures and burns to symptoms of stroke.

One Iraqi man who was given medical help with his wife and
sister aboard the U.S. Navy ship Comfort said, "They treat
us like family. There are babies in Iraq who are not cared
for by their mothers as well as the nurses have cared for
us."

Already, we are seeing important progress in Iraq. It
wasn't all that long ago that the statue fell, and now
we're seeing progress. (Applause.)

Rail lines are reopening and fire stations are responding
to calls. Oil, Iraqi oil, owned by the Iraqi people, is
flowing again to fuel Iraq's power plants.

In Hilla, more than 80 percent of the city has now running
water. City residents can buy meats and grains and fruits
and vegetables at local shops. The mayor's office and city
council have been reestablished.

In Basra, where more than half the water treatment
facilities were not working before the conflict -- more
than half weren't functioning -- water supplies are now
reaching 90 percent of the city. The opulent presidential
palace in Basra will now serve a new and noble purpose:
We've established a water purification unit there to make
hundreds of thousands of liters of clean water available to
the residents of the city of Basra. (Applause.)

Day by day, hour by hour, life in Iraq is getting better
for the citizens. (Applause.)

Yet much work remains to be done. I have directed Jay
Garner and his team to help Iraq achieve specific long-term
goals, and they're doing a superb job.

Congress recently allocated nearly $2.5 billion for Iraq's
relief and reconstruction. With that money, we are renewing
Iraq with the help of experts from inside our government,
from private industry, from the international community
and, most importantly, from within Iraq. (Applause.)

We're dispatching teams across Iraq to assess the critical
needs of the Iraqi people. We're clearing land mines. We're
working with Iraqis to recover artifacts, to find the
hoodlums who ravished the National Museum of Antiquities in
Baghdad. (Applause.)

Like many of you here, we deplore the actions of the
citizens who ravished that museum. And we will work with
the Iraqi citizens to find out who they were and to bring
them to justice. (Applause.)

We're working toward an Iraq where for the first time every
electrical power is reliable and widely available.

One of our goals is to make sure everybody in Iraq has
electricity. Already, 17 major power plants in Iraq are
functioning. Our engineers are meeting with Iraqi
engineers, we're visiting power plants throughout the
country and determining which ones need repair, which ones
need to be modernized and which ones are obsolete.

Power plant by power plant, more Iraqis are getting the
electricity they need.

We're working to make Iraq's drinking water clean and
dependable. American and Iraqi water sanitation engineers
are inspecting treatment plants across the country to make
sure they have enough purification chemicals and power to
produce safe water.

We're working to give every Iraqi access to immunizations
and emergency treatment, and to give sick children and
pregnant women the health care they need.

Iraqi doctors and nurses and other medical personnel are
now going back to work. Throughout the country, medical
specialists from many countries are identifying the needs
of Iraqi hospitals for everything from equipment and
repairs to water to medicines.

We're working to improve Iraqi schools by funding a
back-to-school campaign that will help train and recruit
Iraqi teachers, provide supplies and equipment, and bring
children across Iraq back into clean and safe schools.
(Applause.)

And as we do that we will make sure that the schools are no
longer used as military arsenals and bunkers, and that
teachers promote reading rather than regime propaganda.
(Applause.)

And because Iraq is now free, economic sanctions are
pointless. (Applause.)

It is time for the United Nations to lift the sanctions so
the Iraqis can use their own resources to build their own
prosperity. (Applause.)

Like so many generations of immigrants, Iraqi-Americans
have embraced and enriched this great country without ever
forgetting the land of your birth.

Liberation for Iraq has been a long time coming, but you
never lost faith. You knew the great sorrow of Iraq. You
also knew the great promise of Iraq, and you shared the
hope of the Iraqi people.

You and I both know that Iraq can realize those hopes. Iraq
can be an example of peace and prosperity and freedom to
the entire Middle East. (Applause.)

It'll be a hard journey. But at every step of the way Iraq
will have a steady friend in the American people.
(Applause.) May God continue to bless the United States of
America, and long live a free Iraq. (Applause.)

"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect target."

A British newspaper, The Independent, reports that "intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war." One "high-level source" told the paper that "they ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat."

Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction. It's hard to believe that we won't eventually find some poison gas or crude biological weapons. But those aren't true W.M.D.'s, the sort of weapons that can make a small, poor country a threat to the greatest power the world has ever known. Remember that President Bush made his case for war by warning of a "mushroom cloud." Clearly, Iraq didn't have anything like that — and Mr. Bush must have known that it didn't.

Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it doesn't: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask some hard questions — not just about Iraq, but about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001 the World Health Organization — the same organization we now count on to protect us from SARS — called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10 billion per year — a small fraction of what we will spend on war and occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America's first major postwar acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And that must be true — we wouldn't let innocent people die just to spite the French, would we?

So it seems that our deep concern for the Iraqi people doesn't extend to suffering people elsewhere. I guess it's just a matter of emphasis. A cynic might point out, however, that saving lives peacefully doesn't offer any occasion to stage a victory parade.

Meanwhile, aren't the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth?

One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.'s. Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement — if it is ever announced — that it was a false alarm? It's a pattern of misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent coverage; the subsequent debunking did not.

Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the administration's credibility? Some strange things certainly happened. For example, in September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency report that he said showed that Saddam was only months from having nuclear weapons. "I don't know what more evidence we need," he said. In fact, the report said no such thing — and for a few hours the lead story on MSNBC's Web site bore the headline "White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq." Then the story vanished — not just from the top of the page, but from the site.

Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and muted or suppressed retractions, the American public probably believes that we went to war to avert an immediate threat — just as it believes that Saddam had something to do with Sept. 11.

Now it's true that the war removed an evil tyrant. But a democracy's decisions, right or wrong, are supposed to take place with the informed consent of its citizens. That didn't happen this time. And we are a democracy — aren't we?