[Mb-civic] Bush Aide Fires Back at Critics On Justification for War in Iraq - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Bush Aide Fires Back at Critics On Justification for War in Iraq

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 11, 2005; Page A01

The White House went on the offensive in the debate over the Iraq war 
yesterday, insisting that U.S. intelligence had compiled a "very strong 
case" that Saddam Hussein harbored banned weapons and accusing 
congressional critics of hypocrisy because many of them voted for force 
three years ago.

Bristling from fresh assaults on its justification for war, the White 
House dispatched national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to the 
briefing room to issue a rebuttal to "the notion that somehow the 
administration manipulated prewar intelligence about Iraq." The 
administration's judgment on the threat posed by Iraq, he said, 
"represented the collective view of the intelligence community" and was 
"shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

"Some of the critics today," Hadley added, "believed themselves in 2002 
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, they stated that 
belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because 
they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American 
people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements exposes 
the hollowness of their current attacks."

The unusually combative statement by the normally mild-mannered Hadley 
underscored how the issue has inflamed political dialogue in Washington 
in the days since a senior White House official was indicted in the CIA 
leak case. Democratic leaders have seized on the indictment to refocus 
attention on the broader question of how President Bush led the nation 
to war.

For the Bush team, the Iraq war has evolved into the most damaging 
political liability at a time of multiple setbacks, and the president's 
advisers do not want Democrats writing the history of how the war began. 
The White House decided to respond aggressively in hopes of convincing 
the American people that Bush relied in good faith on intelligence that 
proved wrong in an effort to protect them -- rather than skewing the 
data to rationalize a war he was already determined to wage, as many 
Democrats contend.

Successive investigations have documented the failure of U.S. 
intelligence agencies to correctly judge Iraq's chemical, biological and 
nuclear weapons programs before the war, including a commission 
appointed by Bush that concluded that the intelligence was "dead wrong." 
The government relied on lying sources, fragmentary information and 
unwarranted analysis, the commission found, resulting in one of the 
"most damaging intelligence failures in American history."

Democrats immediately took issue with Hadley's account. Within minutes 
of his briefing, the Senate Democratic caucus issued a statement saying 
the responsibility did not fall on lawmakers who voted to authorize use 
of force: "Some critics of how the administration misused intelligence 
did believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. What 
these critics object to is the hyping of the intelligence by the Bush 
administration."

In a separate statement earlier in the day, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy 
(D-Mass.) recounted the various urgent warnings about supposed Iraqi 
weapons delivered by Bush and his advisers in the months leading up to 
the March 2003 invasion -- warnings that all proved overstated if not 
flatly wrong.

"In his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the 
American people," Kennedy said. "It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. 
It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy 
to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear 
weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war."

Hadley yesterday offered no direct critique of the prewar intelligence 
and instead said that at the time it was compelling evidence that also 
convinced the Clinton administration and other governments.

"The intelligence was clear in terms of the weapons of mass 
destruction," Hadley said, citing a National Intelligence Estimate 
provided to Bush. "The case that was brought to him, in terms of the 
NIE, and parts of which have been made public, was a very strong case."

Hadley noted that the presidential commission, led by retired judge 
Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), said 
it found no evidence that administration officials manipulated 
intelligence. But the panel was not allowed to examine how policymakers 
used the information.

By forcing a rare closed-door session last week, Senate Democrats 
successfully pressured the chamber's Republican leadership to promise to 
speed up an inquiry into the Bush administration's handling of prewar 
intelligence. But a House Republican leader declined any additional 
inquiry by his body's intelligence committee.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the House intelligence chairman, instead 
said his panel would expand an inquiry into the leaking of classified 
information to include three new matters -- the revelation of secret CIA 
prisons abroad, the disclosure of Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation and 
the inadvertent release last week of the nation's intelligence budget by 
the deputy director of national intelligence.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/10/AR2005111002402.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051111/8683c54e/attachment.htm