Another Duel In Credibility Gulch

This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

Bush's escape strategy is in the form of a political campaign. Why now? Perhaps because now is when his approval ratings are at the lowest point of his presidency. Perhaps because his party just lost gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and a docket of referenda in California. Perhaps because a recent Wall Street Journal/NBS News poll found that 57 percent think the president "deliberately misled people to make the case for war."

He launched the getaway caper on Veteran's Day in Pennsylvania in a speechthat restated, quite clearly, his rationale for the war on terror while swooping down to take on his critics. Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, ran a simultaneous maneuver from the right. And then the president essentially repeated his speech this week on his way to Asia.

Here is the part of the president's response to his critics (and not just the Democratic ones) that made them so ornery so fast:

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

The 'demoralizing our boys and comforting the enemy' line is a last ditch, McCarthy-lite gambit that doesn't work in this country. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used it to fill their credibility gaps, without success. It was cheap and cowardly then and it still is now.

Furthermore, it's not crystal clear who exactly the "ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life" is. Is it the Sunnis blowing up the Shiites in Iraq? Or the Shiites blowing up the Sunnis? Or is it the Shiites and the Sunnis when they are blowing up Americans? Or Jordanians blowing up Jordanians? Or is it the prisoners in secret CIA prison camps?

Who exactly are these people getting the wrong message and encouragement from the speeches of Harry Reid, John McCain and Chuck Hagel? (Here's Hagel on the administration's new counter-offensive: "The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them.")

The administration is especially perturbed that some critics still believe the case it made for war lacked integrity and still want a proper investigation into the policy uses of pre-war intelligence.

Here's the RNC's Mehlman from his Veteran's Day speech: "Amazingly these same Democrats who looked at the same intelligence as the President and came to the same conclusions now want an investigation. Maybe this investigation will reveal that they were brainwashed."

The president thinks there's been more than enough investigation: "While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

A couple of points: first, notice the rhetorical slight of hand. To rebut the charge that "we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people," President Bush cites a limited finding in a Senate report that there was "no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

Oh, please. One thing has very little to do with the other. You can manipulate intelligence in making policy without pressuring the spies to cook the books; you can mislead the American people without muscling the analysts around.

Second, the president mischaracterizes the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Yes, the report did state that it "did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."

But the committee specifically - and controversially - put off until after the 2004 elections a "Phase II" report tasked with assessing the public and policy uses of intelligence about Iraq by the administration. The first report simply did not clear the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence and misleading the American people. Period. ("Phase Two" has been delayed and delayed; that's what the ruckus was about when the Senate went into secret session a few weeks ago.)

Third, the Democrats are attempting a creepy "rewrite" of history that would absolve them of responsibility for their votes for the war and their passivity in checking and balancing the administration. But it absolutely does not follow that the administration leveled with Congress or the public, played straight with the intelligence or that investigations are not still needed.

When The Washington Post ran a piece on the president's skewed uses of the Senate report, the White House issued a pugnacious response that had the audacity to reach for support from the Robb-Silberman report on pre-war intelligence - a report that began with these damning words:

"On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over."

So to rebut claims that its case for war was both wrong and politicized, the administration cites a report concluding that the work of the American spy service before the war flat out failed. Okay. The report also states clearly in the introduction that it was "not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community." That's the million dollar question - not whether Scooter and Cheney strong-armed the spymasters.

The Robb-Silberman Commission did find, as the White House rightly asserts, that "analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."

But here's the next sentence: "That said, it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

And a couple sections further south: "The Commission also learned that, on the eve of war, the Intelligence Community failed to convey important information to policymakers."

That is manipulating intelligence and misleading the American people. Saying otherwise, twisting what major reports have said and questioning the patriotism and honor of critics is a sure way to stay holed up in Credibility Gulch.

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By Dick Meyer