Faulty Intel And The Election

Analysis By David Paul Kuhn
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

Though partisan debate will likely increase as a result of the 511-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, analysts say undecided voters are primarily concerned with the present state of troops in Iraq -- and not the past reasoning for war.

In general, the Democrats accuse the Bush administration of reaching conclusions on the war in Iraq before the evidence was vetted. They argue that during pivotal speeches, declarative statements were, and are, being made on the threat posed by Iraq, absent the necessary proof.

The Republicans argue otherwise. The blame lies solely on the intelligence community and the Bush administration was only working with the evidence it was given. To the GOP, it is a matter of subordinates misleading the executive.

Beyond party lines, the report's criticisms of the CIA were damning. The CIA assessments of Iraq holding weapons of mass destruction "were wrong," they were "unsupported," said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee chairman. He added that the "global intelligence failure" was "without precedent in the history of the committee."

At the same time that Roberts and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., the committee's vice chairman, were releasing the report in Washington, President Bush was speaking to a cheering crowd at the basketball arena of Kutztown University, in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Bush told 2,800 Pennsylvanians the United States went to war "to whip them in Iraq before we have to face them here at home." He added shortly after that that his administration was going to "stay on the offense" because his greatest fear was that "we're going to get attacked again."

"The politics are very murky," says Mickey Edwards, a Republican member of Congress for 16 years and a current legislative expert at Princeton University. "Most of what comes out says the failure is related to the CIA's inability to gather appropriate information and analyzing it."

But this is an election year. A president will be chosen in four months. And politics belies the intelligence report because polls show President Bush likely wins or loses the election based upon events in Iraq, providing the economy remains relatively unchanged.

The report did not delve into the Bush administration's culpability, though the hour-long press conference exhibited the partisan rancor seething beneath the issue.

The committee senior Republican, Roberts, and the senior Democrat, Rockefeller, were fundamentally at odds over the definition of one keyword: pressure.

"I felt that the definition of pressure was very narrowly drawn in the final report," Rockefeller told reporters. The committee unanimously agreed there was no evidence of literal pressure, such as a White House surrogate directing the point of view of a CIA analyst.

"Another description of pressure is the total ambience of this cascade of ominous statements, which continued really up to the present, about what was going to happen or the relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq, Mohammed Atta and the rest of it."

In response, Roberts said "you can define pressure any way you want," but that if you "read the report. I do not think there is any evidence of undue pressure on any analyst."

Roberts added that "repeatedly, I asked ... if anybody felt pressured, more especially in terms of politics," and he said no one spoke up related to Iraq.

"So from my standpoint, I do not believe, think, there was any political pressure," Roberts continued. "Now, was the WMD section wrong? You bet. And I think that's the bottom line."

The "bottom line," as Roberts put it, was that the bipartisan commission discredited the Bush administration's primary justification for war – that Iraq had, and was, attempting to gain, weapons of mass destruction. It's the following point that splits Democrats and Republicans: is the intelligence community solely to blame?

For American voters, the debate over whether the Bush administration applied "pressure" will have less impact on the presidential election than the status of the U.S. troops in Iraq," says Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

"The most important thing about Iraq, to the American voter, is not how we got there, but where we are going," he adds. But, he says, for most undecided voters "the opinions about Iraq are going to be event driven."

By David Paul Kuhn
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