Iraq Charges Against Bush Begin to Mount Up For Voters

Criticism of President Bush's motives and decision-making in attacking Iraq last year may be acquiring critical mass with voters following criticism by former top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke.

Political consultants and analysts said Clarke's allegation that Bush ignored the al Qaeda threat before the Sept. 11 attacks and was obsessed by a desire to invade Iraq were especially damaging because they confirmed other previous revelations from policy insiders.

"Each of these revelations adds to the others so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the message gets reinforced with voters," said Richard Rosecrance, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Before Clarke, there was former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who asserted in a book published in January that Bush began laying the groundwork for an attack on Iraq from the moment he took office.

Then came the bombshell from former weapons inspector David Kay that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Bush launched the war to find and destroy probably did not exist.

Kay on Tuesday warned that U.S. credibility at home and abroad was in grave danger and urged the Bush administration to own up to its intelligence failures.

"We are in grave danger of having destroyed our credibility internationally and domestically with regard to warning about future events," he said. "The answer is to admit you were wrong, and what I find most disturbing around Washington ... is the belief ... you can never admit you're wrong."

Earlier this month, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix added to the fire by accusing Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of "exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the political support (for the war) they would not otherwise have had."

The response from the White House, especially to Clarke, has been fierce and sometimes personal. It rejects any suggestion that Bush, running for re-election this year as a "war president," failed to take the al Qaeda threat seriously.

el - Is all of this peaking too soon?