In a damaging setback for the Bush re-election campaign, leading Republicans in the US Senate are now openly saying that they might not have voted to give President George Bush authority to use force against Iraq if they had known how wrong intelligence was on Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Conor O'Clery, North America Editor reports
"I don't know if the votes would have been there," Mr Pat Roberts, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said yesterday when asked about the 77-23 vote in the Senate on October 11th 2002.
The committee's report on Friday, which said most Bush administration pre-war claims about Iraq's unconventional weapons were unfounded, has propelled the war in Iraq to the forefront as the central driving issue in the presidential election campaign.
Mr Bush defended going to war, saying "although we haven't found stockpiles of weapons" the US was right to attack Saddam Hussein.
"He was a dangerous man," he said. "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer."
That assertion was also challenged by the Senate report which, echoing arguments made by US opponents of the war, concluded that Saddam Hussein posed little threat to the United States.
The report cited intelligence assessments over a decade showing the Iraqi military had been steadily degraded by US actions and UN sanctions since the 1991 Gulf War and that Saddam Hussein's military capabilities "would continue to be eroded as long as sanctions remained in place".
Democratic presidential candidate Mr John Kerry and his running mate Mr John Edwards made clear in interviews yesterday that they would make the war their number one priority in the campaign leading to the November 2nd election.
President Bush "certainly misled America about nuclear involvement", Mr Kerry said. "And he misled America about the types of weapons that were there, and he misled America about how he would go about using the authority he was given."
Soldiers lost their lives because he was wrong, the Massachusetts Senator went on, and America was paying billions of dollars and allies were not with them because they were wrong.
In an ominous sign for Mr Bush that support is fraying among traditional supporters over Iraq, a veteran of previous Republican administrations lectured a weekend meeting of conservative Republicans in Washington about restlessness in the Republican base over the war.
Mr Stefan Halper told the 150 conservatives, who listened in silence, that "the war is not going well, it's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our friends and allies". Mr Matthew Dowd, the Bush-Cheney campaign's chief strategist, described the fear of losing conservative support as "just ludicrous", and said that Mr Bush is "as strong among conservative Republicans as any Republican president has been".
In the October 2002, Senate vote on war powers, 29 Democrats voted for the war, including Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards, and 21 against, plus a lone Republican, Senator Lincoln Chaffee.
Senator Roberts told NBC's Meet the Press, "I don't know if I would have or not," when asked if he would have voted against force if he knew then what he did now. The Republican senator added, however, "I doubt if the votes would have been there."
His Democratic deputy on the intelligence panel, Senator Jay Rockefeller, said that the Senate would have rejected war, a claim backed by other senators including Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, who said she would have voted against war if she had known the report's conclusions.
Anxious to avoid charges of flip-flopping, Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards declined to say if they too would have voted against the war resolution.
A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign nevertheless accused Mr Kerry of changing his position on the war "on an almost weekly basis". The Senate report said that most claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes were "either overstated or were not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting".
A new opinion poll by Newsweek magazine shows the Democratic ticket had widened its lead over the Republicans with 51 per cent of the vote versus 45 per cent for Mr Bush and Mr Dick Cheney.