Biden: Bush 'tricked' Americans into going
to war
Dallas Morning News
By GROMER JEFFERS JR. / The Dallas Morning News
November 13, 2005
As the administration on Sunday rejected assertions that President Bush
misled the American people about Iraq, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden charged that
history would judge the president harshly about his actions before and during
the war.
He said the American people are starting to "catch on" that they were at
least partially "snookered and tricked," though he said that's not the
administration's greatest failing.
"President Bush will be judged harshly for the opportunities he squandered
to unite the county and unite the world," Mr. Biden said in a speech to the
Dallas Democratic Forum at the Melrose Hotel.
Meantime, Stephen Hadley, U.S. national security adviser, said Sunday that
"we were wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
But he said Mr. Bush relied on the collective judgment of the intelligence
community when he determined that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction, Mr. Hadley said.
"Turns out, we were wrong," Mr. Hadley told Late Edition on CNN. "But I
think the point that needs to be emphasized ... allegations now that the
president somehow manipulated intelligence, somehow misled the American people,
are flat wrong."
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who also attended the rally in Dallas, agreed
with Mr. Biden.
"If we're going to go to war, it shouldn't be a faith-based initiative," he
said. "We ought to have some facts."
Republican lawmakers and other officials who appeared on Sunday news shows
echoed Mr. Bush's Veterans Day speech in which he defended his decision to
invade Iraq.
Mr. Bush said Democrats in Congress had the same intelligence about Iraq,
and he said many now claiming that the information had been manipulated had
supported going to war. The president also accused his critics of making false
charges and playing politics with the war.
Democrats contend that they are not playing politics but are trying to clean
up the mess made by the administration.
Mr. Biden said that today he would push an amendment that would require Mr.
Bush to discuss his plans for Iraq with the Congress and the American
people.
He said the lack of a strong plan for ending the war and dealing with
insurgents could make Iraq a haven for terrorists and create a civil and
regional war.
"The bar has been raised very, very high because of the incompetence of this
administration, and it seems very difficult to figure how could we possibly
salvage our national interest and bring our troops home at the same time," he
said. "If we don't hold him to that [developing and sharing a plan for Iraq],
it means in fact that there is no way out because there is no plan."
Mr. Biden said it would be a mistake to leave Iraq now.
"The American people wanted to believe that the president would never take
them to war without a plan. They convinced the American people, by not leveling
with them, that they had the competence to do this quickly," he said. "The only
thing more irresponsible for a leader to do than to go into Iraq without a plan
is to leave Iraq without a plan."
Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean rejected Republican criticism on
Sunday and said, "The truth is, the president misled America when he sent us to
war."
On NBC's Meet the Press, the party chairman disputed Mr. Bush's claim that
Congress had the same information – the president withheld intelligence
and some caveats about it, Mr. Dean said – and that two commissions had
found no evidence of pressure being placed on those within the intelligence
community.
In fact, Mr. Dean said, how the administration handled the intelligence it
received has yet to be determined by a Senate committee.
Contending that the president has not been honest about the size of the
deficit as well as the war, Mr. Dean said, "This is an administration that has
a fundamental problem telling the truth."
Mr. Hadley said Mr. Bush received dissenting views about the accuracy of
intelligence and relied on the collective judgment of the intelligence
community as conveyed by the CIA director. The national security adviser
criticized those who continue to say Mr. Bush manipulated the intelligence and
made misleading statements.
"It is unworthy and unfair and ill-advised, when our men and women in combat
are putting their lives on the line, to relitigate an issue which was looked at
by two authoritative sources and deemed closed," he said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said that Democrats have a right to criticize the
war but that it was disingenuous to claim that Mr. Bush lied about intelligence
to justify it.
"Every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russians, the French
... all reached the same conclusion," Mr. McCain said on CBS' Face the
Nation.
In a column for The Washington Post, former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said
he was wrong to have voted to give Mr. Bush the authority to go to war and
called the intelligence on which he made that decision "deeply flawed and, in
some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda."
"The information the American people were hearing from the president –
and that I was being given by our intelligence community – wasn't the
whole story," wrote Mr. Edwards, the Democratic nominee for vice president in
2004. "Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this
war."
E-mail gjeffers@dallasnews.com
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