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Bush takes responsibility for invasion intelligence: President says removing Hussein still 'right decision'
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- On the eve of Iraq's historic election, President Bush took responsibility Wednesday for "wrong" intelligence that led to the war, but he said removing Saddam Hussein was still necessary.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said during his fourth and final speech before Thursday's vote for Iraq's parliament. "As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that."
"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision," the president said. "Saddam was a threat and the American people, and the world is better off because he is no longer in power."

On Monday, speaking in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the cradle of the U.S. Constitution, Bush compared Iraq's struggles with American history.
"It took a four-year civil war and a century of struggle after that before the promise of our Declaration (of Independence) was extended to all Americans," Bush said. "It is important to keep this history in mind as we look at the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq."

The president unexpectedly took questions from the audience, including one from a woman who asked Bush how many Iraqi "civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators" had been killed in the war. "I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis," Bush said. "We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan later said Bush was basing his statement on media reports, "not an official government estimate."