Washington (FA wire) - In the wake of yet another well-photographed Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, President Bush today offered his apologies and took responsibility for the incidents.

“I’m the Commander in Chief,” he said in a press conference on the White House lawn. “The conduct of the military is therefore my responsibility. I want to apologize to the Iraqi people and the American people.”

“When you look at what happened, you have to conclude that this abuse was a systemic problem,” the President went on. “And there’s little doubt that the fact that so many soldiers believed the Iraqis were partly to blame for 9/11 had something to do with these atrocities. In retrospect, I regret that I allowed and encouraged this misapprehension for the short-term benefit of securing popular support for the war - it definitely caused our soldiers to view themselves as avengers rather than liberators. That’s my fault.”

The President went on to concede that U.S. troops believing they were fighting an enemy that had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction might have also fueled their rapacious behavior. “Another big ‘oops,’ there,” he said. “When you consider that that the enemy had no terrible weapons, didn’t really fight back, and wasn’t even remotely responsible for any terrorism against Americans…. well, letting our soldiers believe that this was the case might not have been the greatest idea. That one’s on me. My bad.”

Afterwards, Bush sent a letter of apology to France. He acknowledged that he’d recently reacquainted himself with Foreign Minister Villepin’s statements before the war, which included the assertion, “We know already and Mr ElBaradei said that in a couple of months he might be able to certify that there are no nuclear programmes in Iraq. In the ballistic, we’ve seen the progress made through the missiles. Now we come to the biological and chemical programmes. We make progress also in these fields,” and “We think that when you have a friend, sometimes this friend disagrees and it is very important for a friend to be able to tell the truth.”

“Wow,” said the President. “He was really right on with that one, wasn’t he? And to think that as President I said nothing as the Congress offered ‘Freedom Fries’ and American citizens poured bottles of French wine into the streets. Gosh, I’m sorry about that.”

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