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Sen. Rick Santorum took a rare swing Friday at President Bush,
saying the war in Iraq has been less than optimal and that some blame for that lies with the White House.
Santorum,
a conservative Republican and usually a strong Bush ally, said the unpopularity of the war should be shared between the White
House and the media.
"Certainly, mistakes were made," Santorum
said of the war's conduct. "But that's a criticism you can make of every conflict."
The comments, made after a Veterans
Day speech at the Union League in Philadelphia, came at the same time the Pennsylvania senator stressed he wasn't trying to
distance himself from the president, who spoke moments earlier about 80 miles away at the Tobyhanna Army Depot.
Bush's
poll numbers are the lowest of any time during his presidency, in part due to the climbing death toll in Iraq. He is also
blamed by some for the loss of the Virginia governor's race, in which he appeared with Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore
the day before the election. Kilgore lost.
Santorum, facing an uphill re-election fight next year, said missing the
president's appearance was nothing more than a scheduling conflict; he had already committed to the Philadelphia event when
the president made plans to speak at Tobyhanna at the same time.
The senator criticized the media for blowing the issue
out of proportion, and for what he said was unbalanced reporting on the Iraq war.
The media only report the death toll,
Santorum said. While conceding that is "a piece of the story," he questioned how the public would have felt about World War
II if the media had reported only the body count and not news of cities liberated by the Allies.
And in the same way
that World War II was a fight against Naziism and fascism, Santorum said the "war on terror" should really be called a war
on Islamic fascists.
He said Bush made a mistake by labeling it a "war on terror," which Santorum equated with calling
World War II a "war on blitzkrieg."
"Terror is nothing more than a tactic," Santorum said.
He noted Bush recently
redefined the conflict as a war on Islamic fundamentalists.
Bush, however, used the "war on terror" moniker in his
speech at Tobyhanna.
"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high and the national interest is too important
for politicians to throw out false charges," the president said, referring to no specific politician. "While it's perfectly
legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that
war began."
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