The White House said Monday that President Bush was no longer using the phrase “stay the course” when speaking about the Iraq war, in a new effort to emphasize flexibility in the face of some of the bloodiest violence there since the 2003 invasion.

“He stopped using it,” said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,’ when, in fact, it is the opposite.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has used the phrase “stay the course” several times in discussing the war in Iraq in recent years, echoing a key phrase of the White House, contrary to an article published today in The Times.

The article used a database to analyze hundreds of Mr. Lieberman’s war-related comments since 2001. It pointed out that Ned Lamont, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate, frequently criticized Mr. Lieberman for being a strong supporter of the Bush Administration’s “stay the course” policy on Iraq, and said that in the statements reviewed the senator never actually uttered that phrase.

In fact, Mr. Lieberman has used the phrase at least half a dozen times over the last two years, during a presidential debate and in several television interviews — including several instances that were covered in The Times database. As recently as November 2005, upon returning from a trip to Iraq, for instance, he said on CNN’s American Morning that he agreed with the administration’s view that it was necessary to “stay the course.”

posted by tparty at 8:48 PM