From the Internet:

For a man untroubled by the need for linguistic purity, President Bush surpassed even himself
yesterday as he sought to portray President Saddam Hussein as a scheming and evasive dictator.

Declaring that Saddam had "crawfished"out of previous agreements with the United Nations, Mr Bush
accused him of "stiffing the world."

In doing do, Mr Bush appeared to ghave invented a word. The verb "crawfish" is unknown even to slang
dictionaries, although it might derive from crawfish, or crayfish, a freshwater crustacean.

According to linguistics experts, such evocative use of the word as a verb has grown in recent years in
the US to describe someone who backs out of a position.

Asked about the Presidentes use of the word, Ari Fleischer, his spokesman, referred to broken Iraqi
commitments to disarm, adding: "This is what Saddam Hussein has tried his best to slither out of, as
the President put it, 'to crawfish out of'.'"

I've seen crawfish shells after racoons ate the meat, but I have never seen a live crawfish in
motion, and so did not know until just now that they move backwards preferably. I used to
see it in cowboy pulps, but didn't know that it was used as a insult, meaning someone
retreated in an unhonorable way.