Five years ago, when a President was fighting for his political life, his defenders struggled to keep his sins in perspective. All he did was lie about sex, they said of Bill Clinton’s breach of trust–it’s not as if he had been fooling around with matters of war and peace. Imagine how ugly a debate like that could become over the issues that matter most, matters of life and death. For a President, trust is the one asset that, once lost, he can’t buy back. This may be especially true for George W. Bush, whose appeal has always been personal as much as political. People say they like him because he’s tough and straight and principled, even if they sometimes disagree with the principles themselves. It now seems likely that either Bush wasn’t telling the truth about his reasons for going to war or he didn’t know the truth and can’t quite admit it. Neither prospect is very reassuring. “Is it harmful to the President? Absolutely,” says Christopher Shays, a Republican Representative from Connecticut, about the cracks that have opened in the case for war. “The thing that this President had going for him before Iraq was, you may not have agreed with Iraq, but you believed what he told you.” Which is how it came to pass that over the course of four days last week the White House staged a revival meeting with the full choir singing in his defense as the President performed the rites of political redemption. For the skeptics, he named a commission to explore the intelligence failures and included his eternal scold Senator John McCain to sanctify it. He bowed before U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the Oval Office in an admission that the deadlock in Iraq could not be broken without his help. For the believers, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told lawmakers on the Hill that those weapons might still be found; CIA chief George Tenet defended his intelligence by suggesting there’s no such thing as perfection in his business; and the apostate Colin Powell was back in his pew after suggesting he might have some doubts about how we got here. The message from all sides was essentially this: We weren’t wrong, and if we were, no one can prove it. Bush himself chose to walk into the lion’s den, sitting down with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press. Russert told the President there was a sense among voters that the intelligence on Iraq had been manipulated and that the nation had rushed to war. Bush defended his decision making: “I’m just trying to make sure you understand the context in which I was making decisions. He had used weapons. He had manufactured weapons. He had funded suicide bombers. He had terrorist connections. In other words, all of those ingredients said to me, threat.”
