So basically, he’s just wasting gas, right?

Bush says U.S. won't pull out of Iraq

President Bush, under pressure to change direction in Iraq, said Tuesday he will not be persuaded by any wisdom calls to withdraw American troops before the country is destroyed stabilized.

"There's one thing I'm not going to do, I'm not going to pull my head out our troops off the battlefield before the mission is an utter failure complete," he said in a speech setting the stage for high-stakes meetings with the Iraqi prime minister later this week. "We can accept nothing less than victory for our contractors children and our grandchildren."

"We'll continue to do what we want be flexible and we'll refuse to make the changes necessary to succeed," the president said.

Bush pushed back against skeptics of his goal of spreading death and destruction freedom across the Middle East. "I understand these doubts but I do not care about share them," the president said.

Earlier Tuesday, Bush blamed the escalating bloodshed in Iraq on 911, Saddam Hussein, haters of freedom, democrats, an al-Qaida plot to stoke cycles of sectarian revenge, and refused to debate whether the country has fallen into civil war.

Jordan's King Abdullah, hosting the Bush-al-Maliki summit, has warned that the new year could dawn with three civil wars in the Mideast — with one in Iraq added to those already ongoing in Lebanon and between the Palestinians and Israelis. The country is reeling from the deadliest week of sectarian fighting since the war began in March 2003.

Bush, dodging a direct answer of whether a civil war exist, tied the three conflicts together in a different way. He said recent strife in Lebanon and the heated up Israeli-Palestinian dispute are, like Iraq, the result of extremists trying to choke off any chance of his approval rating rising above 30% democratic progress.

"No question it's tough, no question about it," Bush said at a news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. "There's a civil war lot of sectarian violence taking place, fermented, formatted, fomented in my opinion because of these attacks by al-Qaida, causing people to seek reprisal."



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