His credibility in question, US President George Bush is struggling to patch up his image in time for the November elections. Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and could not have posed a threat to the United States, a result that was made clear after a week of confession. US President George Bush is clearly feeling the heat of growing suspicion about the fundamental justification for his war against Iraq nearly a year ago: that the former regime, possessing "stockpiles" of some of the world's "most lethal weapons", was a looming threat to global security. Not only did David Kay, the former director of the Iraq Survey Group searching for its alleged weapons of mass destruction, conclude that the intelligence community was "all wrong" on its pre-war claims, but so did the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, in a rare public speech last week. Meanwhile, more information is being leaked on how intelligence bodies depended on unreliable Iraqi defectors, selectively picking information of dubious veracity that backed the administration's case for war. Worse, suspicions over Bush's credibility have come at the beginning of the presidential election season, with some opinion polls showing his popularity ratings dwindling to 49 per cent. In a clear attempt to restore his popularity, Bush, who is strongly adverse to facing the media, agreed to be grilled for nearly an hour in a popular Sunday political talk show on whether he had "misled the nation" into an unnecessary war. However, in his interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert, the US president clearly failed to impress his audience, as he rehashed the same old arguments, while insisting he did the right thing. Midway through the interview, Bush said he did not want "to sound like a broken record", and admitted, "Now, I know I'm getting repetitive." Although he confessed that his earlier claims that Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons were wrong, Bush said that the capability of the ousted Iraqi regime to produce WMDs was good enough reason to launch the war. Labelling former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a "madman", and "a dangerous man" nearly a dozen times, the US president recalled his main theme: following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, he could not take the risk of overlooking any possible threat to US security, adhering to his doctrine of pre-emptive strikes. "I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons," Bush said. "But he [Saddam Hussein] had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network," the US president said in reference to another major pre-war claim which has not yet been substantiated: that the former Iraqi regime maintained ties with the terrorist Al-Qa'eda organisation led by Osama Bin Laden, possibly providing it with WMDs to conduct attacks inside the United States. In many speeches before the war, Bush called Iraq "the central front in the war against terror", and said that eliminating Saddam Hussein would prevent some terrorist attacks on American cities. "It's important for people to understand the context in which I made a decision here in the Oval Office. I'm dealing with a world in which we have gotten struck by terrorists with airplanes, and we get intelligence saying that there is, you know, groups who want to harm America. And the worst nightmare scenario for any president is to realise that these kind of terrorist networks had the capacity to arm up with some of these deadly weapons, and then strike us," Bush said. The US president also avoided definitively closing the Iraqi WMDs file, at least until after the upcoming presidential elections in November. Bush said he still believed banned weapons could still be found in Iraq, that they could be hidden somewhere, destroyed shortly before the war, or moved to another country. Syria was the only country US officials said they suspected could have been the final destination of Iraq's elusive WMDs. US Secretary of State Colin Powell and other top officials said they did not have any solid information that this was the case, but insisted that it remained a possibility, a charge that Syria vehemently denied. Bush spoke passionately of his belief that "America has a responsibility in the world to lead... a responsibility to promote freedom, to free people from the clutches of barbaric people such as Saddam Hussein," and said that he believed "freedom and democracy will be a powerful long-term deterrent to terrorist activities" in the Middle East. Sounding like a man on a mission, Bush said, "the long-term vision and the long-term hope -- and I believe it is going to happen -- is that a free Iraq will help change the Middle East. You may have heard me say we have a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. It's because I believe so strongly that freedom is etched in everybody's heart. I believe that and I believe this country must continue to lead." But Bush critics, led by Senator John Kerry, the Democratic front-runner in primary elections to win his party's nomination to compete in November's presidential race, were quick to note that the reasons Bush listed in his interview were not the same as those he cited before the war. "This is a far cry from what the president and his administration told the American people throughout 2002. Back then, President Bush repeatedly told the American people that Saddam Hussein 'has got chemical weapons'. They told us they could deploy those weapons in 45 minutes to do injury to our troops... And it was on that basis that he sent American sons and daughters off to war. Now the president is giving us new reasons for sending people to war," Kerry said. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who built his initially successful campaign to win the Democratic Party's nomination for presidency on opposing the Iraq war, expressed a similar view: "This president has some peculiar thing going on about Saddam Hussein. There's no question he's a terrible person. There's now no question at this point that he was never a threat to the United States or an imminent threat to the United States. The president for whatever reason has not been truthful with the American people about why we went to war." After Kay offered his evaluation of Iraq's alleged banned weapons programme, Bush came under tremendous pressure from Congress, and agreed to form an independent committee to investigate why US intelligence claims turned out to be wrong. However, the composition of the committee, whose members were hand-picked up by the president, and the fact that Bush decided that it would issue its report by the end of March 2005, clearly reflected that he wanted to avoid a major embarrassment ahead of November's elections. Out of seven members Bush selected as members of the committee, only one has experience in intelligence affairs. He also limited its mandate to reviewing what went wrong in intelligence gathering, not just in relation to Iraq, but also in Libya, Iran and North Korea. American analysts believe that Bush has no choice but to stick to his earlier claims on Iraq, since admitting a major error at this stage could cost him his presidency. In the same framework, Bush announced he would resist the pressure coming from his own Republican Party to remove Tenet as director of the CIA, a move which would make Tenet the scapegoat for the administration's current credibility crisis. Unlike Powell, who said he could have changed his mind on the war had he known Iraq did not possess stockpiles of weapons, Bush cannot afford to appear hesitant, analysts believe. However, there is no doubt that the American president, whose main advantage in the upcoming election campaign will be his image as a strong leader in turbulent times, is in serious trouble, and that he has a lot of explaining to do to his own people and to the rest of the world.
