Iraq: That other scandal

Iraq: That other scandal

For Bush, every cloud has a silver lining. His administration may be under immense pressure because of "Intimigate," but it is helping to deflect criticism away from some of the recent revelations regarding the Iraq war.

Writing in USA Today, Walter Shapiro warns that "there is a danger of losing sight of the real scandal amid the search for the administration leakers. And that is the president's continued inability to explain why we invaded Iraq based on seemingly faulty intelligence and unarguably without a well-developed plan for reconstituting a war-torn nation."

Let's not overlook these three developments, says Shapiro:

* According to media reports, the interim report of the American weapons-search team headed by David Kay is expected to acknowledge the inability to locate Saddam Hussein's purported arsenals of chemical and biological weapons. Because George W. Bush and his top advisers have consistently justified the Iraqi war as needed to eliminate these weapons of mass destruction, the failure of the four-month search should call into question the validity of the administration's claim that Saddam posed an imminent threat.

* Republican Porter Goss and Democrat Jane Harman, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter last week to CIA Director George Tenet criticizing "significant deficiencies" in the intelligence gathering before the invasion of Iraq. This bipartisan critique, based on a four-month examination of 19 volumes of classified intelligence information, further undermines the administration's stated case for war.

* The New York Times reported Tuesday that Joe Allbaugh, Bush's 2000 campaign manager, and two top Republican lobbyists have formed a new firm to advise companies on how to win contracts to rebuild Iraq. This legal buck-raking -- along with the contracts awarded to Halliburton, the company that Dick Cheney headed before he was picked as Bush's running mate -- suggests an eagerness to turn Iraq into a profit center.