Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.it's a weird sentence; combining the passive voice "mistakes have been made" with a conditional. politicians love "mistakes have been made" (or its more common version: "mistakes were made") because the sentence never tells us who made the mistakes. it's designed to acknowledge mistakes without assigning blame to anyone.
but then bush went on to say that "responsibility rests with me." so that could be read as taking away the passiveness of "mistakes have been made" by assigning an actor, except that he couched that clause in a conditional: "where mistakes have been made..." thus, he's says that he is only responsible to the extent that "mistakes have been made."
but he never out and out says that mistakes, in fact, have been made. nor does he list what those mistakes of his might be. that's not what "acknowledging" a mistake is. you have to identify where you went wrong rather than just admitting that things in general might have gone wrong. and you have to say that, to the extent that such things have gone wrong, you're responsible for those specific wrongs.
admittedly bush went further towards admitting mistakes in iraq that he ever has before. just using the "m" word is very unusual for this president. and earlier in the speech is this bit:
When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together ? and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.that last sentence implicitly suggests that there might be mistake (again notice the passive of "the opposite happened"). bush thought x, y and z would happen, but instead "the opposite happened." but i think the sentence reads more as just a prediction that didn't pan out. he doesn't seem to be suggesting a mistake because you can't identify what specific decision bush did wrong. he doesn't want to say that he now believes that iraq should not have had elections or that we never should have trained iraqis. especially considering that bush's plan for the future includes both further elections and training. in fact, nowhere in the speech is there any hint of what bush, in hindsight, now thinks he should not have done, or should have done differently. bush did not acknowledge any actual mistakes.
But in 2006, the opposite happened.
which is odd because the white house seems to want bush to be credited for such an acknowledgement. at least that's how they're spinning the speech. but if that's what they wanted to do, why use such a weird passive voice plus conditional construction of the critical sentence? why not just say "i made mistakes in iraq" or, better yet, list a couple of specific misjudgments and then explain how bush's new proposal will avoid those mistakes in the future. that's really what the country needs and that's what the white house wants to take credit for. sometimes bush seems to have an almost pathological aversion to the simple phrase "i was wrong."
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1-i'm doing this from memory, the quote may not be perfect.
