Wanted Dead or Alive

Bush had a press conference last night which I missed until just now. Famously, he finally talked about mistakes made during the war in Iraq. That's amazing, I suppose. But one of the items he felt regret for was:

Wanted Dead or Alive. That kinda talk. It, uh, I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpretted, and so I learned from that.

Excuse me? What's going on here? Who disagrees with wanting Bin Laden "Dead or Alive?" How is the message that sends a mistake? You're damned right I want him dead or alive. Preferrably alive, sure, so we can squeeze him for information then execute him. The message wanting him Dead or Alive sent was exactly right: "We will rain holy hell down on the people that did this to us, and anyone that helped them. We will continue to defend ourselves aggressively, and if anyone out there does something like this again, we'll get them and their enablers too. No conception of reasonableness will slow us." It's exactly the sort of primordial rage that I require, and more importantly, it evinces the genuine Bad-Assedness that the world needed to see in the wake of of attacks. This exagerated stick serves to make the carrots that much more appealing, and thereby decrease the support worldwide for using terrorism against Americans. Of course, that's assuming there are meaingfull carrots also in the mix, and the Bush Administration doesn't really do that...