WASHINGTON – While facing repeated questions about the war in Iraq during a weeklong tour of Europe, President Bush has made it clear: He regrets only some of the words he used, not the actions his administration took.

“Presidents don’t get to do ‘re-dos,’ they don’t get to do ‘look backs … ifs,”‘ Bush told a British newspaper toward the end of what is likely to be the last tour of a continent where some leaders and much of the public have openly opposed the war.

“History will judge the tactics,” Bush added Monday, facing the question anew at a news conference with Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London, where a reporter asked Bush, “Is it possible you got it wrong?”

“Removing Saddam Hussein was not wrong,” the president replied. “It was the right thing to do.”

All that Bush regrets, said is some of his harsher “rhetoric.”

“I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” the president told The Times of London.

He meant words such as “bring them on” and “dead or alive.”

Words such as these, he told The Times last week, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

Bush was asked about that concession during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Reporter: “Do you actually just regret your war rhetoric, or do you regret having gone to war with Iraq?”

“I don’t regret it at all,” Bush replied. “Removing Saddam Hussein made the world a safer place.”

“The guy said, ‘Now what could you do over?”‘ Bush said of the Times interview. “First of all, you don’t get to do things over in my line of work. But I could have used better rhetoric to indicate that, one, we tried to exhaust the diplomacy in Iraq, two, that I don’t like war.”

The president told French television in an interview taped before his arrival in Paris last week: “Sometimes my rhetoric was a little – was misunderstood. I mean, I can remember saying, you know, ‘dead or alive,’ which sent … signals that could be easily misinterpreted.”

After more than five years in Iraq, most Americans now have turned against the war. A majority tell pollsters they believe the invasion was a mistake.

“Nothing worse than a politician making decisions based upon the last Gallup poll when people’s lives are at stake, or where they have made a sacrifice,” Bush said in an interview with The Observer, a British newspaper, recounting his private meetings with the families of fallen soldiers.

“I will tell you this: Many, many families look at me trying to determine whether or not, one, I believed that it was necessary, and two, whether or not I’m going to let their son or daughter kind of lie in an empty grave when it comes to the sacrifice they made. They want to know whether or not the president – if he believes it was necessary – whether or not he’s going to see this thing through, regardless of what they’re screaming on the TV sets.”

The president maintained that his own “spirits are pretty high. I mean, I’m – you got to believe, you know?

“You got to have a set of beliefs that are the foundation for your very being,” he told The Observer. “Otherwise, these currents and tides and 24-hour news and politics will kind of leave you adrift.”

Bush, returning to Washington, where Democratic congressional leaders still are trying to find a way to reign in U.S. troops at war, avowed that he remains at peace with himself: “I tell people that when I get home I’m going to look in that mirror and say, ‘I didn’t sacrifice my core beliefs to satisfy critics or satisfy pundits.””

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