Editorial: President’s bad week

Friday, June 4, 2004 | 9:20 a.m.

President Bush was almost giddy on Tuesday as he talked about the new government forming in Iraq. It was some good news for an administration whose mission there looks as if it's on the verge of becoming a quagmire. The reality, however, is that this has been a bad week for the president.

For starters, serious allegations were made that Ahmad Chalabi, who played a pivotal role in leading the United States to invade Iraq, had told Iran (part of Bush's Axis of Evil) that the U.S. intelligence agencies had broken Iran's secret communications codes. If true, it would be a terrible breach of security, especially since the FBI is investigating whether a U.S. official disclosed this highly classified information to Chalabi, ostensibly a friend of the United States.

The administration has been seeking for more than a week now to put considerable distance between itself and Chalabi. And when Bush was asked by a reporter on Tuesday whether Chalabi had fallen out of favor with the administration, Bush acted as if he barely knew him. "I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come up with a group of leaders," Bush said. "But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him." Come on. Chalabi sat right behind Bush's wife as an honored guest during this year's State of the Union speech. More importantly, this is the same Chalabi who was the fair-haired boy of the Bush White House and who spoon-fed it what turned out to be faulty intelligence. Chalabi claimed that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq, onc e Saddam was toppled, would welcome the United States as liberators.

Ironically, the man Chalabi blamed for orchestrating his falling out with the Bush administration, CIA Director George Tenet, resigned on Thursday. Tenet had come under criticism for failing to see through the bogus intelligence that provided the basis for invading Iraq. The White House hopes Tenet's departure will shift blame for the failures in Iraq from Bush to Tenet. But let's not forget that it was Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Department hawks, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted this war and didn't want anything to get in their way. The president, too, was itching for war in Iraq. Ultimately, it was the president's responsibility to press his top advisers so that they would give him unvarnished information -- not just what they thought he wanted to hear.

The White House wants to distance itself from what's going wrong in Iraq, but it's Bush's war. The American public, which increasingly is worried about the war's direction, is showing that it isn't being fooled -- no matter how much the White House tries to spin this its way.