The Heat Is On

Washington hath no fury like a Henry Waxman scorned. On March 17, as President Bush made final preparations to order the invasion of Iraq, the veteran Democratic Congressman from California asked the White House to explain how forged evidence claiming Iraq had sought nuclear material from Niger featured in the State of the Union address. Waxman had supported the October 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use force against Iraq. But with the revelation that the CIA did not believe to be credible the intelligence Bush had used, Waxman says, "I wanted an explanation."

Waxman got no answer from the White House--nor much attention from the docile media or his Congressional colleagues. But he persisted, dispatching letters to the President and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, raising the issue in hearings and floor speeches, and finally, in late June, convincing more than twenty House Democrats who had also supported the war resolution to co-sponsor legislation to establish an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate "an inexcusable breakdown in our intelligence system prior to the Iraq war."

Even that action rated little notice. But barely ten days later, reporters and members of Congress were asking whether the President had employed deceit to lure the country into an unwarranted "pre-emptive" war. It was more than just mounting death tolls, troubling calls for more troops and questions about whether weapons of mass destruction would ever be found that inspired previously silent sections of the Washington establishment to follow Waxman's lead. Simmering frustrations within the intelligence community boiled over into open complaints--and back-channel leaks--that suggested the Administration had inflated intelligence to identify threats that may never have existed. Meanwhile, pollsters saw the number of Americans who were pleased with Bush's management of the conflict dip below 50 percent for the first time since the fighting began, with growing numbers wondering whether the threat posed by Iraq had ever been as serious as Bush claimed.

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