There is much heated debate about how an evidently false statement got into Mr Bush's State of the Union Speech, writes Conor O'Clery
One question dogged the first president Bush. What did he know about the Iran-Contra scandal when he was vice-president under Ronald Reagan? The damage to his credibility from a critical pre-election report on the illegal arms-for-hostages deal may have cost him the 1992 election against Bill Clinton.
Now his son, George W. Bush, is facing similar, possibly even more serious, credibility issues over whether he led the nation to war on false pretences.
For months allegations have been building up about the manipulation of intelligence by the US and Britain to make the case for toppling Saddam Hussein's regime by force. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction and reliance on a "dodgy dossier" has shaken British politics to the core, but the issue had only been simmering in the US, where support for the war was shaped by the experience of September 11th, 2001.
This week it finally came to the boil. What is widely seen as the smoking gun is a statement by President Bush in his annual State of the Union Address, delivered with great pomp and ceremony to the joint Houses of Congress on January 28th, at a time when opposition to the war was mounting in the United States. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Mr Bush told the country. With nuclear arms, he went on, "this dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons" could create "deadly havoc".
On Monday the White House admitted that the statement should not have appeared in the speech. The result was uproar.
Mr Bush will return from his five-day trip to Africa to a much less sympathetic political landscape than the one he left behind.
The President, whose word is the coin of the realm, has become a figure of ridicule for cartoonists. His veracity is being mocked in late-night comedy shows. When Mr Bush, dressed in pilot's regalia, landed on an aircraft-carrier in the Pacific on May 1st to declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Democrats feared that the picture would become a campaign ad for the Bush re-election effort. Now the Democrats plan to run an ad showing the President delivering the nuclear warning with the words: "In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat. America took him at his word. But now we find out it wasn't true."
The damage is not just due to one wrong phrase. After his statement in the address, Mr Bush went on: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he (Saddam Hussein) has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." This, too, was discredited evidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that the 81mm tubes sought by Iraq were "not directly suitable" for centrifuges, but appeared intended for use as conventional artillery rockets.
The alleged attempt to buy nuclear material from Africa, it is now known, was based on crudely forged documents passed on by British intelligence. They detailed a plot by Iraq to buy "yellow-cake" uranium from Niger.
The CIA knew for almost a year that the Niger story was untrue. The agency sent former African ambassador Joseph Wilson to check it out in early 2002 in reply to a query from Vice-President Dick Cheney's office. Mr Wilson went public last Sunday to say he reported back to the CIA and State Department after a few days that there was little chance any such transaction was in the works.
It is inconceivable, analysts say, that Mr Cheney's office, which ordered the CIA investigation, did not know from the spring of 2002 that the uranium story was almost certainly bogus. Yet the charge was made by the British government in a September White Paper and reappeared in a US response to the United Nations in mid-December, this time specifically mentioning Niger.
There is much debate now about how the evidently false statement got into Mr Bush's State of the Union Speech, especially since the White House admitted that it was a "mistake" to include it. Who put it there? A look back at earlier speeches by Mr Bush, however, shows that the alleged nuclear threat was a constant theme for the President as he sought to convince the American people and Congress - from whom he needed war powers - in the autumn of 2002 that Iraq posed a deadly danger to the US.
For example, on October 7th, 2002, in a speech at the Cincinatti Union Terminal in Ohio, he said the US had information that, despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear programme to continue.
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme," Mr Bush declared. "Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his nuclear Mujahideen - his nuclear holy warriors.
"Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear programme in the past.
"Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
"And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position ... to threaten America." Mr Bush concluded that, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
None of what Mr Bush alleged has been borne out by the post-war revelations. The IAEA has concluded that Saddam Hussein was not trying to reconstitute his nuclear threat.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said this week that the reference to uranium used by Mr Bush in the State of the Union address was not repeated in his own high-profile presentation to the UN Security Council barely a week later. After looking at it more thoroughly "and we really went through every single thing we knew about all of the various issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction, we did not believe that it was appropriate to use that example any more. It was not standing the test of time," he said.
"And so I didn't use it, and we haven't used it since ... I didn't use the uranium at that point, because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world." On March 8th, three days after Mr Powell's UN presentation, IAEA chief inspector Dr Mohamed ElBaradei declared the uranium claim to be forged after he had been reluctantly given the documents a few days before.
Yet on Sunday, March 16th, when Vice-President Cheney was asked on NBC television if he disagreed with the finding by Dr ElBaradei that Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear programme, he said: "I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community, disagree ... We know that based on intelligence, that \ ... has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong." The frightening allegation that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons" is an even more serious case for the administration to answer. By Mr Powell's account the evidence of reconstituting nuclear weapons had been discredited before his March 5th UN speech. It had been dismissed by the IAEA.
This week, as the questions came thick and fast, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that at the time of the State of the Union Address the knowledge that the uranium claim was a lie was only known by someone "down in the bowels of the agency" and that "no one in our circle knew there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery". But this was no longer heldto be the case when Mr Cheney spoke.
Even more startling this week was a claim by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the strongest proponents of the war, in testimony to a Senate committee on Wednesday that he had learned only "within recent days" that the nuclear information was bogus.
Mr Rumsfeld also astonished senators by stating the US did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, but because it saw existing evidence "in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on 9/11". This relegates the debate about intelligence to an irrelevancy - America was going to war no matter what.
As always, it is not the substance of the matter but the question of who knew what, and when and at what level, and what they did about it, that has caused a political firestorm for the administration. At the highest level the fingers are being pointed at the CIA. "We all at a senior level get a chance to look at a State of the Union address," said Mr Powell. "I saw it - the whole speech - and it was my understanding that it had been seen and cleared by the intelligence community."
Mr Bush, dogged at every step in Africa by a suddenly voracious press corps, said, "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." Ms Rice also said the CIA cleared the speech. If CIA director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the President's speech, "he did not make them known", she told journalists accompanying Mr Bush. She also said she first heard of Ambassador Wilson's 2002 trip to Niger on a recent TV programme.
However, according to CBS News, CIA officials warned members of the President's National Security Council staff, headed by Ms Rice, that the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement to Congress that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. It also claimed that Mr Tenet was not involved in those discussions and apparently did not warn the President he was on thin ice.
Government insiders have stirred up the suspicions of high-level deception. For example, Greg Thielmann, a director of strategic, proliferation and military affairs at the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research until the autumn, said yesterday, "The administration did not provide an accurate picture to the American people. Iraq posed no immediate threat."
In Thursday's Wall Street Journal, columnist Al Hunt articulated a growing sense in Washington that "if Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about sex ... then lying about the reasons for going to war - whether it was the President or one of his subordinates - ought to command an inquiry from the people's representatives." Yesterday the call for heads to roll was taken up by both Republicans and Democrats. Republican Senator John McCain said: "There needs to be an investigation to find out who was responsible (for the false claim) and fire him," though he added nothing would change the fact that the war was justified.
Howard Dean, campaigning for the presidential nomination in New Hampshire, demanded the resignation of any Bush administration member who failed to tell the President that claims about Iraq buying uranium from Africa were false, even if this meant Mr Cheney. "The only other possibility, which is unthinkable, is that the President of the United States knew himself that this was a false fact and he put it in the State of the Union anyhow," he said. "I hope for the sake of this country that did not happen."
Sen Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, held Mr Bush to account for using the erroneous information. "I believe in the old admonition if you're the captain of the ship and the ship goes aground, you're responsible," he told CNN.
The controversy might not be so damaging were it not for the fact that the post-war situation in Iraq had not become so chaotic. Saddam Hussein is apparently still alive and calling for resistance. According to the Pentagon, of the 214 US troops killed in Iraq since the war began on March 20th, 76 have died since May 1st when Mr Bush declared major combat operations over. A total of 1,044 have been wounded, 382 since May 1st.
Mr Rumsfeld's other stunning revelation to Congress this week, that is was costing $3.9 billion a month to keep US troops in Iraq, had Congress members in an uproar. The costs were to be borne by Iraq's oil revenues, but these are expected to total just $5 billion dollars this year and $15 billion next year.
In all of this, the stock of the neo-conservatives has plummeted. Sen Joseph Biden was incredulous that the administration had not sought NATO help in shouldering some of the burden of peacekeeping and reconstruction. "Nobody's asking them," he said. The US Senate voted 97-0 on Thursday for a non-binding resolution which said President Bush "should consider requesting formally and expeditiously" the deployment of NATO forces to Iraq, a clear slap at the Pentagon for trying to go it alone without help from such countries as France and Germany.
It is unlikely that the 10-nation alliance would agree, as a request could lead to what one diplomat called a political "train wreck". Sen Robert Byrd, the most severe critic of Washington's isolationism, asked if Americans were dying because of a flawed mission. America, he said grimly, was now reaping the "bitter, bitter fruit" of not involving the international community.