As Dan Froomkin noted a couple of weeks ago, President Bush has spoken exclusively to heavily screened audiences for months, and almost never answers questions from other citizens.

So the news that he took questions yesterday after his speech to the World Affairs Council about Iraq was somewhat shocking — I shared the audience’s reaction to Bush’s joke, as recorded in the official White House transcript of the event:

I thought I might answer some questions. (Laughter.)

Unfortunately, Bush generally received easy questions and stuck to his talking points, so nothing really happened, though this exchange was noteworthy:

Q I would like to know why you and others in your administration invoke
9/11 as justification for the invasion of Iraq —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes —

Q — when no respected journalists or other Middle Eastern experts
confirm that such a link existed.

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate that. 9/11 changed my look on foreign policy.
I mean, it said that oceans no longer protect us, that we can’t take
threats for granted; that if we see a threat, we’ve got to deal with it.
It doesn’t have to be militarily, necessarily, but we got to deal with it.
We can’t — can’t just hope for the best anymore.

And so the first decision I made, as you know, was to — was to deal with
the Taliban in Afghanistan because they were harboring terrorists. This is
where the terrorists planned and plotted. And the second decision, —
which was a very difficult decision for me, by the way, and it’s one that I
— I didn’t take lightly — was that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He is a
declared enemy of the United States; he had used weapons of mass
destruction; the entire world thought he had weapons of mass destruction.
The United Nations had declared in more than 10 — I can’t remember the
exact number of resolutions — that disclose, or disarm, or face serious
consequences. I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to
Saddam Hussein, you’re a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that
threat, as far as I — concerned.

And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he
refused. And I made a tough decision. And knowing what I know today, I’d
make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better
place and America a safer country.

This, again, is unintentionally funny. “Extenuate” is the wrong word — it means “to lessen the strength or effect of.” Bush apparently meant “exacerbate.”

More generally, Bush uses standard doubletalk avoid engaging the question, while adding a vague reaffirmation of the 9/11 linkage. His answer begs the question, however: why did 9/11 exacerbate the threat from Saddam Hussein? If anything, it made the likelihood of US retaliation for any potential attack all the more certain. (For many examples of the administration’s misleading claims linking 9/11, Al Qaeda and Iraq, see All the President’s Spin.)