Bush credibility knocked in the election runup

By RUPERT CORNWELL


"Wait until Charlie gets back with the final report," President George W. Bush said in June, fending off reporters trying to get him to admit that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Yesterday "Charlie" - aka Charles Duelfer, the chief US weapons inspector - did get back and his report could send shockwaves though an election campaign in which the Iraq issue already dwarfs all others.

Mr Duelfer's main finding, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, was widely expected. But the thoroughness of the 1000-page report, based on nine months of work by the Iraq Survey Group led by Mr Duelfer, is an enormous blow to President Bush's rationale for going to war.

It is bound to be seized on by John Kerry in his second debate with Mr Bush tomorrow as further proof that the President rushed to war without waiting for the facts.

In a bid to limit the damage, Mr Bush stressed in Pennsylvania yesterday that the "real risk" was that Saddam would give weapons or know-how to terrorists.

Nonetheless, the President's record in office now looks less impressive than perhaps at any moment since the day in May last year when he landed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished".

Day after day, Mr Kerry has hammered away at the gap between the President's rosy assertions and the bloody reality on the ground in Iraq.

One blow after another struck the President's credibility. First came the leak of a CIA-commissioned intelligence report suggesting Iraq might be sliding into civil war.

That was followed by the leaked speech of a CIA Middle East specialist, who said the agency had warned the White House before the war that an invasion would probably be followed by an insurgency.

Next came Mr Bush's dismal showing in the first debate in Florida, when Mr Kerry turned the spotlight from September 11 to the disorder in Iraq. Then a New York Times report showed how the Administration deliberately played down the dissent of its own experts when it claimed Saddam had been buying aluminium tubes to build nuclear weapons.

Those revelations made a mockery of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's pre-war warning that if the US waited, the "smoking gun" proving Iraq's weapons threat might be "a mushroom cloud".

The Duelfer report was not the only embarrassment for Mr Bush. Another CIA report doubted links existed between Saddam and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose group has executed Westerners.

- INDEPENDENT