At last, President Bush is 'œfighting back,' said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. For months, the White House stood silently by as the president's enemies spread the slander that he 'œlied us into war' with Iraq. But twice in the past week, Bush gave speeches that reminded us all of the truth: Before the invasion, even anti-American nations such as France and Germany were certain that Saddam Hussein was hiding stockpiles of WMD. So were Democrats in Congress, which is why more than a hundred of them, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize force. It's just unfortunate that Bush waited so long to deliver this 'œcounterpunch'—according to a new poll, 57 percent of Americans now believe the myth that he 'œdeliberately misled people' about Iraqi WMD.
Deliberately or not, said Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, Bush didn't tell Americans everything he knew. The record clearly shows that Bush and his aides 'œhad access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers'—and that the White House consistently screened out doubts that Saddam really posed a threat. Here are several telling examples, said David Corn in The Nation. When intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam still had a weapons 'œprogram,' Bush told Congress and the American people that Iraq had amassed vast 'œstockpiles' of biological and chemical weapons. When a captured terrorist, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, said under interrogation that Iraq was training al Qaida operatives, Bush reported this to the nation as an established fact. Months earlier, though, al-Libi recanted his claim of al Qaida'“Iraq ties, and the CIA warned the White House that everything he'd said was unreliable. And when Iraq was caught importing aluminum tubes, Vice President Dick Cheney said the tubes served as 'œirrefutable evidence' that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons. The 'œgovernment's foremost nuclear expert,' though, had already concluded the tubes couldn't be used in centrifuges, as Cheney claimed.
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