Despite the straight-talking image, Bloomberg has been hard to pin down on one of the most important issues of the presidential campaign: the Iraq war. During his first term, which began in 2002, he mostly avoided speaking out on international issues, but more than once he indicated he supported the decision to go to war.
In 2004, during a news conference with first lady Laura Bush in lower Manhattan, he came to her support on the topic of Iraq, suggesting that the invasion was justified by the Sept. 11 attacks.
``Don't forget that the war started not very many blocks from here,'' he said.
A year later, while Bloomberg was running for re-election in this overwhelmingly Democratic city and doing everything he could to distance himself from President Bush, he insisted the issue was about supporting the troops.
When asked at that time if he felt the president had lied to Americans about the reasons for going to war, Bloomberg said he didn't have any idea. At the time, he said, there appeared ``a distinct possibility of weapons of mass destruction.''
More recently, he has harshly criticized those who advocate pulling out of Iraq, siding with many Republicans who say it would hurt troop morale. He has also slammed the proposal put forth by Sen. Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate for president, to divide Iraq into three semiautonomous regions of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, saying it would result in ``genocide.''
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