Bush vows he’s ‘in charge’

President Bush yesterday asserted his authority as the chief decision maker on postwar Iraq and lashed out at critics for portraying his advisers as paralyzed by political infighting.

“The person who is in charge is me,” Mr. Bush said in an interview with Turner Broadcasting. “In all due respect to politicians here in Washington, D.C., who make comments, they’re just wrong about our strategy. We’ve had a strategy from the beginning.”

Mr. Bush was referring to Democrats as well as fellow Republicans like Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The senator suggested on Sunday that Mr. Bush was losing control of Iraq policy to squabbling subordinates.

“The president has to be president, over the vice president and over these secretaries,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

He was referring to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, each of whom, along with Mr. Bush, gave addresses about Iraq last week. Mr. Lugar complained they were four “distinctly different speeches.”

In addition, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week he had not been informed that Miss Rice was being put in charge of a new task force to cut red tape in the reconstruction and democratization of postwar Iraq. Democrats and journalists pounced on the revelation as evidence of disarray within the administration.

Mr. Bush insisted he was making the decisions about Iraq, based largely on advice from envoy L. Paul Bremer.

“Jerry Bremer is running the strategy and we are making very good progress about the establishment of a free Iraq,” the president said.

He also gave a speech praising Americans who “are willing to sacrifice for the country they love.” Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, had accused the president Sunday of failing to protect U.S. troops in Iraq.

Mr. Bush said GIs and other Americans “remember the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. And so do I. It’s something we should never forget.”

His remarks came 24 hours after Mr. Kerry, a presidential candidate, accused the White House of treating the Iraq war like a political “product,” not a matter of life and death.

“It’s not a product,” Mr. Kerry said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It’s the lives of young Americans in uniform.”

He said Mr. Bush had created a “mess” in which “young Americans are dying by the day in Iraq.”

Two more American soldiers were killed yesterday — one when a convoy was ambushed southeast of Jalyula, and another in a grenade attack in Tikrit — bringing to 97 the number of American combat deaths in Iraq since major operations ended May 1.

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