Saturday June 19, 2004
Sogobia
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9/11 Panel's Findings Vault Bush Credibility To Campaign Forefront
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004
The White House's swift and sustained reaction last week to the preliminary
findings of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission showed the potential threat the
10-member panel poses to President Bush's reelection prospects.
After the commission staff released its findings Wednesday that there was no
"collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda --
challenging an assertion Bush and Vice President Cheney have made for the
past two years -- Bush declared again that there was, in fact, a
relationship.
Democratic and Republican strategists agree that many details of the
controversy do not pose a grave threat to Bush's reelection chances.
The significance, rather, is whether Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John
F. Kerry (Mass.), can use the commission's findings to split the Iraq war
from the war on terrorism in the public's mind, and, more broadly, raise
doubts about Bush's credibility and competence by building on the failure to
find weapons of mass destruction and the miscalculations about the Iraqi
resistance.
Bush has long sought to link the Iraq invasion to his popular war on
terrorism after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With
the commission's final report due on July 26 -- as the Democratic convention
begins -- Kerry is already trying to use the panel's findings to his
advantage to decouple the Iraq war from the post-9/11 U.S. retaliation in
Afghanistan.
"The 9/11 report is just one more issue that casts doubt on the truthfulness
of this White House," said Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's campaign spokeswoman.
"This White House is operating under a cloud of secrecy, and the American
people have lost the ability to trust them."
Late last week, commission leaders invited Cheney to provide intelligence
reports that would buttress the White House's insistence that there were
close ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, a commission member said.
Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton told
the New York Times they wanted to see any additional information in the
administration's possession after Cheney said Thursday in a television
interview that he "probably" knew things about Iraq's ties to terrorists
that the commission did not.
The panel also wants to follow up its questioning of national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice and outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Los
Angeles Times reported yesterday that Tenet, who leaves office in July, had
agreed to be re-interviewed, and the commission might submit written
questions to Rice.
Many Republicans are furious about the commission -- though its members are
evenly split between the two parties and it is chaired by a Republican
appointed by Bush. They say that Bush was right to oppose the commission in
the first place, and that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was right
this year when he unsuccessfully fought an extension of the commission's
deadline.
The panel has become "a tool for partisan politics," Rep. Eric I. Cantor
(Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview
last week. "With the latest commission finding coming out that there were
allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off
their mission, and I think that's indicative of the political partisanship."
Bush so far has survived challenges to his war rationale, and most Americans
believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting. Still, the debate over the war,
and the credibility of Bush's justifications, has kept the president's
reelection campaign on the defensive and limited coverage of favorable news
domestically such as a steady improvement in the economy and jobs growth.
"We're challenged by the fact that there's been so much in terms of world
events that we haven't gotten much out" on the economy, a senior Bush
campaign aide said. "How do we fight this wave of events in a very crowded
news climate?"
Indeed, the past four announcements of expanding payrolls have been
overshadowed. The commission and its related disputes, said Republican
pollster David Winston, are "complicating things, because this
administration wants to get out information about how the economy is doing."
Bush aides have sought to blunt the Democratic offensive not by challenging
the commission's findings but by arguing that Kerry and the media have
mischaracterized the findings. The White House issued a 1,000-word document
titled "TALKING POINTS: 9-11 Commission Staff Report Confirms
Administration's Views of al-Qaeda/Iraq Ties."
"The 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion as the administration
regarding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda," campaign communications director
Nicolle Devenish said. She said this is Kerry's "desperate attempt to put a
negative spin on what was broad consensus between the administration and the
commission."
Similarly, Cheney, on CNBC, said the media had been irresponsible in
reporting the commission's findings. "What they [the commission] were
addressing was whether or not they [Iraq] were involved in 9/11," he said.
"They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq
and al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways."
In fact, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Friday confirmed that the
commission was addressing the broader relationship. "We found no evidence of
joint operations or joint work or common operations between al Qaeda and
Saddam Hussein's government, and that's beyond 9/11," he said.
One reason for this sensitivity can be found in a poll last week by the
nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The poll found improved support for Bush
and for the Iraq war -- in large part because Americans have been paying
less attention to the war and more to other issues, such as the death of
Ronald Reagan. The commission, however, has helped to return national
attention to the disputed justifications for the Iraq war.
In particular, the poll showed that Americans are beginning to decouple the
war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the
commission's dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. Still,
Andrew Kohut, who directs the poll, predicts Bush will be able to keep al
Qaeda and Iraq tied in the public's mind; about half believe such a
connection has been proved, various polls indicate. "So many people believe
it because he's saying it," Kohut said. "Bush's hanging tough on this gives
him the credibility he has."
Democrats, however, hope to gain critical mass in their effort to convince
the public that Bush is untrustworthy by extending the charge that Bush has
misled the country not just about al Qaeda but about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, the torture of prisoners in Iraq, and even the U.S. economy. In
one sign of the assault, 27 former diplomats and military commanders -- some
Republicans -- issued a statement last week condemning Bush's foreign policy
as "overbearing," "insensitive" and "disdainful," and urging Bush's defeat.
Jim Jordan, Kerry's former campaign manager and now coordinator of an
anti-Bush advertising effort, said the commission painted "a pretty
startling portrait of administration fecklessness" -- and one that Democrats
think they can turn into a major campaign theme.
"The issue," Jordan said, "is trust and [Bush's] competence."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54702-2004Jun19?language=printer