http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2004/07/10/MNG9J7JMFN1.DTLThe conclusions are not earthshaking by themselves. Though President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have not abandoned either rationale, both were already tattered after similar doubts were voiced over many months by U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq, the commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks, CIA officials and others.
The larger question is whether voters will blame the White House for these two mistakes. Though officially agnostic on the White House role in using Iraq intelligence (that will come in a later report), the committee gives ammunition to both Bush and Democratic opponent John Kerry.
On the question of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the bipartisan committee report absolved administration officials of pressuring CIA analysts to inflate the case against Hussein. And while making no judgment on whether the administration distorted the intelligence it was given, the committee made plain that the CIA's case against Iraq was plenty exaggerated on its own. On the issue of Iraq's relationship to al Qaeda, however, the committee's findings imply that the White House, not the CIA, is to blame for making dubious claims that there were working ties between Osama bin Laden's organization and Hussein's Iraq.
The undermining of the administration's case for war is potentially a grave threat to Bush, whose re-election prospects are closely tied to Americans' view of the merits of the Iraq war and whether it advances the fight against terrorism. For that reason, Bush has delayed a final reckoning on Iraq's forbidden weapons by naming a commission that will not report its findings until after the election. In the meantime, he continues to assert ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, and to place blame for any weapons miscalculation squarely on the CIA.