- By appointing an independent commission to exam the intelligence
on Iraq, President Bush hopes to neutralise the issue in this year's election.
-
- In recent days it has been damaging him politically.
For the first time since the war, there's no longer a clear majority of
Americans who believe it was the right thing to do.
-
- The members of the panel have been carefully chosen.
This will make a difficult target for attack, if the Democrats want to
keep the issue alive, as they surely do.
-
- This time the president has avoided the political misstep
he took when he attempted to appoint Henry Kissinger to chair the panel
looking into the events leading up to 11 September.
-
- The members of this commission are less well known, less
controversial.
-
- Mr Bush has dodged the difficult question of finding
an independent chairman by appointing two co-chairs, a Democrat, former
Virginia governor Charles Robb, and a republican, former federal judge
Laurence Silberman.
-
- The choice of Senator John McCain to join the panel is
also clearly intended to blunt criticism.
-
- Senator McCain may be a Republican, but he ran against
Mr Bush at the last election, and is known for being independent-minded
and outspoken.
-
- The rest of the panel include the President of Yale University,
a former deputy director of the CIA and two other senior figures from the
legal profession.
-
- The roll-call is so distinguished that their problem
may be that there are simply too many brilliant brains in the room to come
to agreement.
-
- Targets for the opposition
-
- But the Democrats are unlikely to give up this avenue
of attack in an election year. They will criticise the timescale.
-
- The commission has been given till the end of March next
year to report. It sounds suspiciously like an election-avoidance timetable.
-
- The remit of the commission is so broad, even that schedule
may be ambitious.
-
- They are looking, not only at Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, but also intelligence relating to Iran, North Korea, Libya
and Afghanistan.
-
- Then there is the thorny question of political interference.
Is it their job to examine just the intelligence, or can they look at what
the politicians did with it?
-
- President Bush appeared to suggest that only the intelligence
gathering process would be examined.
-
- Senator McCain has already said he believes it should
look at the role of the politicians.
-
- The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said earlier this
week that he believed the inquiry would examine the whole "food chain"
from the intelligence producers, to the policymakers, the consumers.
-
- So beneath the facade of consensus, there is plenty of
room for dispute. There are likely to be plenty more arguments about access
to documents and the secrecy of the deliberations.
-
- But when the Democratic candidate in the Presidential
debate launches his attack this autumn, Mr Bush now has a pre-scripted
reply: Wait for the commission, wait for their answers, only then will
we know the truth.
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- COMMISSION MEMBERS Laurence Silberman, former judge (chair)
Senator John McCain Chuck Robb, former Democratic senator (chair) Lloyd
Cutler, former White House counsel Richard Levin, President Yale university
William Studeman, former CIA deputy director Pat Wald, former US Appeals
Court judge
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- © BBC MMIV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3467739.stm
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