Rupert Cornwell 

 The Independent

Arab News

WASHINGTON, 25 June 2003 — It has taken more than two months. But belatedly, from his Democratic challengers for the White House and in committee rooms on Capitol Hill, US President George Bush is starting to feel the heat of the controversy over Iraq’s missing weapons stockpiles.

In his weekly radio address, Bush was forced to produce a new explanation of why the US has not found Iraq’s alleged chemical and biological weapons. He told listeners that suspect sites had been looted in the closing days of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

But this rationale is no more likely to still the gathering debate than the president’s dismissal last week of the “revisionist historians” who doubt the administration’s pre-war claims that Iraq not only possessed a huge chemical and biological weapons arsenal and an active nuclear weapons program, but had close links with Al-Qaeda.

Bush hitherto has faced nothing like the pressure on his ally Tony Blair in Britain — partly because the war always enjoyed greater public support here, making his Democratic opponents wary of challenging a popular president on national security.

More fundamentally, most Americans still do not accept the critics’ premise. One recent poll found that a third of the population actually believes that weapons have been discovered, even though the best investigators have come up with are a couple of vehicles some experts say might have been mobile bio-weapons laboratories. According to a Gallup survey last week, 83 percent of Americans believe Saddam was developing N-arms, despite no serious evidence to support that view. The tide may at last be starting to turn. On Capitol Hill, powerful committees are cranking up for hearings into the performance of the intelligence agencies before the war, and whether their findings were exaggerated by the administration.

On the campaign trail too, Democratic candidates are finding a voice. Bob Graham of Florida, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has declared that Bush “politicized and manipulated” the evidence. Even more telling could be the broadside delivered by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, an early front-runner for the presidential nomination.

Kerry, a Vietnam war veteran and an expert on national security, had previously been circumspect on the issue — not least because of his support last autumn for the Congressional resolution giving Bush virtual carte blanche to use force against Saddam. But in fiery remarks in New Hampshire, where the critical primary takes place in January, he accused Bush of lying. “He misled every one of us,” he declared, vowing that Congress would get to the bottom of the matter.