At your job, could you respond to a direct question from your boss with this kind of evasion and expect to keep your job?

Q. Mr. President, before the war you and members of your administration made several claims about Iraq. That U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers. That Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction. And that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, we know where they are. How do you explain to Americans how you got that so wrong? And how do you answer your opponents who say that you took this nation to war on the basis of what have turned out to be a series of false premises?

A. Well, let me step back and review my thinking prior to going into Iraq. First, the lesson of Sept. 11 is when this nation sees a threat, a gathering threat, we've got to deal with it. We can no longer hope that oceans protect us from harm. Every threat we must take seriously.

Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. He was a threat because he funded suiciders. He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States. That's the assessment that I made from the intelligence, the assessment that Congress made from the intelligence. That's the exact same assessment that the United Nations Security Council made with the intelligence.