THE PRESIDENT: Welcome. Please be seated. Thanks.
Last night I addressed the nation about our strategy for victory in Iraq, and the historic elections that took place in the country last week. In a nation that once lived by the whims of a brutal dictator, the Iraqi people now enjoy constitutionally protected freedoms, and their leaders now derive their powers from the consent of the government. Millions of Iraqis are looking forward to a future with hope and optimism.
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Q Thank you, Mr. President. Following up on Wendell's question about the intelligence failures ahead of Iraq, one of the side effects appears to have been that the United States has lost some credibility with its allies when it goes to them with new intelligence. You, for example, your administration, has been sharing with some of your allies the contents of a laptop computer that was found in Iran concerning their nuclear program. Yet you are still having --
THE PRESIDENT: Is that classified? (Laughter.) No, never mind, Sanger.
Q Yet you are still having some difficulty convincing people that Iran has a nuclear program. Can you tell us whether or not you think one of the side effects of the intelligence failure has been that it has limited your ability to deal with future threats like Iran, like North Korea, or any other future threats concerning terrorists?
THE PRESIDENT: Sanger, I hate to admit it, but that's an excellent question. No question, that the intelligence failure on weapons of mass destruction caused all intelligence services to have to step back and reevaluate the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence -- no doubt about that. And so there's been a lot of work done to work with other intelligence agencies to share information about what went right and what went wrong, as well as to build credibility among all services.
I think, David, where it is going to be most difficult to make the case is in the public arena. People will say, if we're trying to make the case on Iran, well, the intelligence failed in Iraq, therefore, how can we trust the intelligence in Iran? And part of the reason why there needs to be a public message on this is because the first hope and the first step is a diplomatic effort to get the Iranians to comply with the demands of the free world. If they don't, there's -- along the diplomatic path, there's always the United Nations Security Council. But that case of making -- beginning to say to the Iranians, there are consequences for not behaving, requires people to believe that the Iranian nuclear program is, to a certain extent, ongoing. And so we're working hard on that. I mean, it's no question that the credibility of intelligence is necessary for good diplomacy.
Q Do you intend to make that case publicly, too? You haven't yet laid out the evidence on Iran --
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that the best place to make the case now is still in the councils of government and convincing the EU3, for example, to continue working the diplomatic angle. Of course, we want this to be solved diplomatically, and we want the Iranians to hear a unified voice. I think people believe that -- I know this: People know that an Iran with the capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon is not in the world's interest. That's universally accepted. And that should be accepted universally, particularly after what the President recently said about the desire to annihilate, for example, an ally of the United States.
And so the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is -- people say, well, we can't let that happen. The next step is to make sure that the world understands that the capacity to enrich uranium for a civilian program would lead to a weapons program. And so therefore we cannot allow the Iranians to have the capacity to enrich. One of the reasons why I proposed working with the Russians, the Russian idea of allowing Iran to have a civilian nuclear power plant industry without enriched material -- in other words, the enriched materials -- without enriching material, the enriching material would come from Russia, in this case, and be picked up by the Russians, was to prevent them from having the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
So I think there's universal agreement that we don't want them to have a weapon. And there is agreement that they should not be allowed to learn how to make a weapon. And beyond that, I think that's all I'm going to say.
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