Bush speech

US President George Bush yesterday acknowledged that 30,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the US-led invasion and its bloody aftermath.

As Iraqi parliamentary elections began, Mr Bush said no country has formed a democracy without “challenges, setbacks and false starts”.

“There’s still a lot of difficult work to be done in Iraq,” the president said, “but thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, the year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point in the history of Iraq, the history of the Middle East and the history of freedom.”