US: Under election-year pressure from Democrats and Republicans, US President George Bush announced yesterday that he would set up an independent bipartisan commission into intelligence failures that led to his pre-war claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Bush did not say how long the commission would have to report, but it will almost certainly run into next year, allowing the White House to postpone any explicit acknowledgement that it was wrong on WMD until after the November election.
"I don't know all the facts," Mr Bush said after a cabinet meeting yesterday. "We do know that Saddam Hussein had the intent and the capabilities to cause great harm, we know he was a danger. And he was not only a danger to people in the free world, he was a danger to his own people; he slaughtered thousands of people, imprisoned people."
The commission would look at the difference between "what we thought and what the Iraqi Survey Group has found," he said, referring to the group of US arms inspectors still in Iraq, and would also examine the US war against proliferation and WMD "in a broader context."
Mr Bush had resisted setting up an inquiry but his tactical retreat became inevitable after Mr David Kay resigned as head of the Survey Group in January and reported that the weapons cited as the main US reason for war against Saddam Hussein did not exist. He told Congress last week that "it turns out we were all wrong, probably" about the Iraqi threat.
A senior White House official said the panel would be patterned after the Warren Commission, a seven-member body under Chief Justice Earl Warren which concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. The members would be "distinguished citizens who have served their country in the past" and are familiar with intelligence, the White House official said.
Mr Bush conferred yesterday afternoon with Mr Kay, whose finding that Iraq had no stocks of unconventional weapons raised serious questions about the Bush administration's credibility.
Democratic Senator Jon Corzine, who failed to get the Republican-controlled Senate to set up a similar bipartisan commission in July, said any investigation must determine whether there was any misrepresentation or exaggeration of intelligence, adding that Americans "are fighting and dying in Iraq because of what the administration told us about the intelligence."
White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan said: "It is important that the commission's work is done in a way that it doesn't become embroiled in partisan politics." He said Mr Bush had summoned Mr Kay to the White House for lunch to "hear what he has learned and get his views".
Observers in Washington said that it would be impossible for the inquiry to report by the election on November 2nd. Republican Congressman Porter Goss, chairman of the House intelligence committee, said nothing would come out this year.
While the main reason for war has been challenged by Mr Kay's findings, the US Army War College has issued a report taking issue with the contention that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism, and Human Rights Watch has challenged the idea that toppling Saddam Hussein was a humanitarian mission.
Republican Congressman Peter King, a supporter of the war, said that the issue of WMD would loom large in the election if Iraq remained unstable. "If people feel things are under control in Iraq, the WMD issue doesn't have traction," he said. "If things go badly, then it does have traction."