Bush says he gave up golf out of respect for war dead

President Bush said Tuesday that he stopped playing golf in 2003 out of respect for U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq war.

"I didn't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said in an online interview with Politico magazine and the Internet portal Yahoo. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them."

Bush said he made his decision after the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

Bush also was asked whether he felt he had been misled about Iraq as he made the decision to go to war. " 'Misled' is a strong word," he said. "Not only our intelligence community but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was."

He acknowledged concerns about possibly leaving the unfinished Iraq war to a Democratic successor. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton have said they will bring the troops home. Bush said his "doomsday scenario, of course, is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States."

REWARD DOWNGRADED

The Bush administration has slashed its reward for Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of Al-Qaida in Iraq, from $5 million to $100,000 because it feels he has lost effectiveness and is no longer worth such a steep price, officials said Tuesday.

ASSOCIATED PRESS