United States President George Bush on Saturday challenged ”misimpressions” about the Iraq war as he battled a gloomy intelligence assessment of the conflict and the fallout of a book portraying him as in denial over it.
With five weeks to go before midterm elections, Democrats seeking to win control of Congress seized on both revelations to charge that Bush was mishandling the war and Republican lawmakers were failing to hold him accountable.
Bush used his weekly radio address to hit back at critics who cited the newly declassified National Intelligence Estimate as evidence the Iraq war has worsened the terrorism threat. He said early leaks about it created ”a lot of misimpressions about the document’s conclusions.”
”Some in Washington have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that by fighting the terrorists in Iraq, we are making our people less secure here at home,” he said.
”This argument buys into the enemy’s propaganda that the terrorists attack us because we are provoking them.”
The White House also went on the offensive against a new book, State of Denial, by journalist Bob Woodward, who writes that Bush resisted demands to boost US troops in Iraq and was misleading Americans about the level of violence there.
The book by the Washington Post reporter who helped break the Watergate scandal in the 1970s went on sale on Saturday, two days ahead of schedule, after a storm of early publicity and it quickly became the top seller on Amazon.com.
Bush was already facing Democratic attacks over the intelligence estimate, which said the Iraq war had become a ”cause celebre” for Islamic extremists.
The president and his Republican allies want to convince Americans ahead of the November 7 midterm elections that they are best able to fight terrorism and that the Iraq war is part of that fight.
Election-year argument
The intelligence estimate, prepared by the 16 US spy agencies, was seen by Democrats as bolstering their argument that Bush’s policies had made Americans less safe.
Parts of the report were leaked to newspapers a week ago and Bush declassified threee-and-a-half pages of it in response.
He cited passages that he said underscore his case against pulling out of Iraq. ”Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight,” the report said.
But Illinois Democratic congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq veteran who lost her legs in the war, said the report showed a failed strategy in Iraq.
”The National Intelligence Estimate revealed the unhappy truth: the war in Iraq has led to more terrorism, not less,” said Duckworth, delivering the Democratic radio address.
The Woodward book said former White House chief of staff Andrew Card twice urged Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whom critics accuse of botching the Iraq war. One of the times Card did so was with the backing of First Lady Laura Bush, according to Woodward.
Card denied leading a ”campaign or orchestrated effort” to oust Rumsfeld and told Reuters on Friday any discussions of Cabinet changes were in a ”broader context.”
The White House issued ”Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward’s Book,” disputing, among other things, the idea that Bush was not leveling with Americans about Iraq. It cited speeches over the last year in which Bush acknowledged problems.
The release also said Laura Bush’s office has denied she pushed for Rumsfeld’s ouster.
As it turned out, it was Secretary of State Colin Powell, considered a voice of caution on Iraq, who was fired in a message delivered by Card eight days after Bush’s re-election in 2004, the Washington Post reported in its Sunday magazine.
In excerpts from another book by a Post journalist, Karen DeYoung, Bush was also quoted as telling his secretary of state that only he, Powell, had the credibility to make the case for an Iraq war to an uncertain U.S. public and skeptical foreign countries before the 2003 invasion. ”Maybe they’ll believe you,” Bush was quoted as saying. – Reuters