White House lashes NY Times over Iraq

The White House on Monday morning harshly criticized The New York Times for a Sunday editorial that accused President Bush of revising history over the Iraq war.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said the editorial, titled “The Deluder in Chief,” expressed “inaccurate and incomplete statements on pre-war intelligence and the war in Iraq.”

{mosads}”While the president has repeatedly acknowledged the mistakes in the pre-war intelligence, there is no support for the Times‘s claim that the president and his national security team ‘knew or should have known [the intelligence] to be faulty’ or that ‘pressure from the White House’ led to particular conclusions,” Hadley said in an early Monday morning statement released by the White House.

“Nothing in the many inquiries conducted into these matters supports the view of the Times‘s editorial board,” continued Hadley, who noted that two reports, including one by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, concluded that no political pressure was applied to the intelligence community.

While the president regrets that the intelligence turned out to be inaccurate, it was the same “intelligence that members of Congress, foreign governments as well as the administration all believed to be accurate,” Hadley said.

President Bush and other officials in the last week have given a number of interviews expressing regret over the Iraq intelligence. Bush described it as the biggest regret of his presidency, while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser when Iraq was invaded, said the faulty intelligence pained her.

Bush and others also have defended the rationale for war, and have not said they would have done anything differently.

Hadley said that while intelligence about former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction proved to be faulty, “he was a threat, and his removal has opened the door to a democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East that is an ally of the United States.”

Hadley also said the so-called surge of troops by President Bush has been a success.

“The New York Times continues to have difficulty acknowledging the undeniable success of the president’s decision to surge an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq,” Hadley wrote. “Because of the surge, Iraq is a more stable and secure country.  It is the success of the surge that is allowing American troops to withdraw from Iraq and return home with a record of
heroic service and still unheralded success.”