PRESIDENT BUSH admitted yesterday for the first time that his decision to go to war in Iraq was based on faulty intelligence. But he still said that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein had been “the right one”.

Mr Bush’s speech, like the three others he has made on Iraq in the past fortnight, set a strikingly more realistic tone about the US’s predicament in Iraq. “It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong”, he told the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a foreign policy forum in Washington.

“As President I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” he said (a rhetorical point that has never been questioned). “I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. We’re doing just that.”

Speaking on the eve of Iraq’s elections, he asserted that: “We are in Iraq today because our goal has always been more than the removal of a brutal dictator. It is to leave a free and democratic Iraq in his place.”

The White House’s new tactic through these speeches has been to admit mistakes but also to reassert America’s resolve. Yesterday Bush added his frequent refrain: “We cannot and will not leave Iraq until victory is achieved.”

In a speech on Monday, in a rare question-and-answer session, he offered his view straightforwardly that 30,000 Iraqis “more or less” had died “in the initial incursion and in the ongoing violence against Iraqis”.

In previous speeches, he has admitted that reconstruction efforts were too ambitions, and focused on nationwide infrastructure (such as getting the power transmission lines running between Basra and Baghdad).

The US would have done better to work on small, local projects that were less vulnerable to sabotage, he said. It was now doing this.

But Mr Bush has stapled all these admissions to an emphatic statement that he did the right thing in going to war. On Monday, answering a question, he said: “Knowing what I know now, I would make the same decision to invade.” The two messages sit together awkwardly. But he could hardly afford to say otherwise, either in view of today’s elections, or of his wavering support at home.

In Iraq, 93 per cent say that they intend to vote, according to the latest poll. This is a boost for Mr Bush’s claim to be promoting democracy.

But in a US poll, although 56 per cent thought there was progress in establishing demo-cracy in Iraq, more than half (53 per cent) also said they thought the US was losing ground in reducing civilian casualties.

The poll, by the respected Pew Research Centre, confirmed the picture offered by other recent surveys — that support for the President is very sensitive to the outcome in Iraq, and that Americans are getting more disillusioned.

Early signs from Congress are that Republicans (some of whom had been trying to distance themselves from Bush) and Democrats have reacted well to the President’s new forthrightness.

“There was a dose of reality that I have not heard before,” said Steve Israel, the Democratic representative from New York, who attended a White House briefing by military commanders before the speech. “Frankly I found it refreshing.”

But politicians across the spectrum are pinning their hopes on today’s elections to set up Iraq’s first full-term Parliament and Government — and to provide the conditions to let the US and Britain withdraw their forces.

However, Iraq may test their patience, and that of the public. One senior British official gave warning yesterday that under Iraq’s constitution, it is allowed up to five months to pick a new government.

On the experience of January’s elections — exhilaration at the smoothness of the poll followed by debilitating delay — Iraq might well take that time. The election results, which may begin to come in on Monday, may not be ratified until the middle of January, and the timetable then allows politicians up to 120 more days.

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