Bush: U.S. doesn't 'need anybody's permission' to attack
By Wolf Blitzer
CNN
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President Bush answers a question at his prime-time news conference on Thursday.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- If any of you had any doubt about President Bush's willingness to use force if necessary to disarm the Iraqi regime, I assume it was dispelled by his nationally televised, prime-time news conference Thursday night.
He was a man who refused to deviate from his stance. The American people, he said, have changed as a result of the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Never again, he said, will the U.S. wait to be hit. With a possible conflict pending, the President was serious and somber as he spoke of the consequences of war.
He is under enormous pressure to bend. American public opinion is divided, according to the polls. Many Democrats are challenging his possible decision to go to war even if there's no additional U.N. Security Council resolution formally authorizing it. Traditional allies, led by France and Germany, are openly challenging his information and judgment. They ask: why not let the U.N. inspectors have more time -- more months - that they say will allow authorities to get to the bottom of Iraqi disarmament intentions.
President Bush is finding some surprising supporters in the international community. He may not have some of the NATO allies with him, but he does have many of the former Warsaw Pact countries in his corner. They say they appreciate freedom, and would welcome the "liberation" of Iraq for the Iraqi people.
President Bush also won some support this week from Rwandan President Paul Kagame. He was in Washington for meetings with U.S. officials, staying at Blair House, the official presidential guesthouse across the street from the White House. While he was there, my colleagues from CNN International interviewed him, and asked him why not wait for the Security Council to take decisive action before going to war in Iraq? Why not wait for a consensus stance to develop?
Kagame recalled the horrendous tragedy that developed in his country and Burundi in the mid-1990s -- when hundreds of thousands of his people were slaughtered in the fighting between Hutus and Tutsis. "There were endless debates at the Security Council about what was going on in Rwanda, about who was doing what, about what name to give it, to give what was going on in Rwanda," he said. "By the time they realized what was going on, we had lost one million people."
Those are powerful words from an eyewitness to genocide.
