John Rapley - Foreign Focus DEMOCRATS IN the US are wondering excitedly if they have finally found a chink in President George W. Bush's armour. Through economic malaise, a soaring budget deficit, a messy war and a wave of rising anger against America abroad, his approval ratings have held up, making him look like a shoo-in for next year's presidential election.
Yet now, the Bush White House finds itself hoist on its own petard.
Feverish damage-control has not yet extinguished the spark of a scandal, which Mr. Bush's enemies are trying to fan into a fire. The scandal, if such it turns out to be, involves the use of faulty intelligence to make the case that Iraq posed an imminent threat to US security with a weapons of mass destruction programme. I reckon that most of the world remained unconvinced by the case made by the Bush administration, but most Americans took it seriously.
The failure, so far, to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has raised questions as to how serious the threat could have been. The White House has come up with some hilariously entertaining answers to explain the absence of evidence: my favourite was the suggestion that Saddam Hussein destroyed them as the Americans invaded.
Still, while the British government shows recent signs of backing down, the Bush administration maintains that weapons will be found. Maybe so, but another problem has arisen. It has now emerged that a line in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address early this year, when he put forth the case for an invasion of Iraq, was based on information the White House probably knew was false. Specifically, Mr. Bush declared that the British had evidence that Saddam had tried to obtain uranium for a nuclear bomb in Africa. The White House then played up the spectre of mushroom clouds over America to drum up support for an invasion.
It turns out that the Americans themselves had discredited the original claim, which was that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger. The official line is that the Central Intelligence Agency failed to draw the president's attention to the error when it was asked to proof-read the State of the Union speech. The CIA director has now acknowledged responsibility for the oversight.
This is unlikely to squelch the matter, though, for it has since emerged that the White House had known for months that the information was suspect.
The rumour is starting to circulate in Washington that some people in the White House knowingly included the statement and possibly other dubious claims because they knew it would generate support for their invasion plans. The fingers are pointing at the Pentagon hawks, who are already on the defensive for having failed to anticipate how difficult mopping-up operations in Iraq would be.
In particular, Vice-President Dick Cheney stands accused by some of manipulating US intelligence so as to generate support for a hard-line policy in the Middle East.
For the time being, this is more of an annoyance than a threat to Mr. Bush. Since the Democrats do not control Congress, they will not be able to pursue the sort of aggressive investigation that might lead to impeachment proceedings. Moreover, to date, there has been little suggestion of wrong-doing on Mr. Bush's part. So far, the paper-trail leads to others in his administration.
Still, it seems unlikely this scandal will die down soon. If the American casualty-toll in Iraq continues rising, if the US gets further bogged down and its bills run higher, public dismay at the Iraq war will swell. In those conditions, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction will raise questions as to whether or not the much-vaunted threat was real.
Lying to the American public in order to win its backing for a war that results in needless American deaths is something ordinary Americans will not easily forgive. If the threat is not soon shown to have been real, Mr. Bush will have to create a fire-wall between himself and those in his administration who were Clintonesque with the facts. If heads do not roll, people will begin to ask if he has something to hide.
Going into next year's election with that question mark over his head, Mr. Bush might well find himself on the defensive.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
