By Mark Silva,Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON – Facing public skepticism on the war in Iraq and Democratic accusations of manipulating prewar intelligence, President Bush counterattacked forcefully Friday as the administration and the Republican Party mount a coordinated effort to reclaim public confidence in the war.

“When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support,” said Bush, seeking to directly answer his critics during a Veterans Day address at an Army base in Pennsylvania. “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.”

The White House’s decision to reinvoke its prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a measure of how politically troublesome the conflict has become. The existence of the weapons was Bush’s chief argument for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but it turned out no such arsenal existed.

The response to critics launched this week by Bush, his national security adviser and the chairman of the Republican National Committee follows attempts by Democratic senators to press for a speedier investigation of purported misuse of intelligence before the invasion.

It also comes at a time when a majority of Americans are calling the invasion a mistake, polls show, and when Bush’s own integrity in making the case for war is increasingly questioned.

“Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war,” Bush said Friday at Tobyhanna Army Depot near Scranton, Pa.

“Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election,” Bush said. Noting that Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was among the senators who voted in October 2002 to authorize use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, Bush quoted Kerry’s justification at the time: “Because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security.”

Kerry, now among the senators calling on Bush to start withdrawing forces from Iraq, responded to the president with his own assault on Bush for “playing the politics of smear and fear on Veterans Day.”

“This administration misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition,” Kerry said. “The mistake we made was trusting the president, and it’s a sad day when an administration’s word is no good.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. – who led fellow Democrats as they forced the Senate into a rare closed-door session last week to question the progress of inquiries into the handling of prewar intelligence – echoed the complaint that Bush was dishonoring Veterans Day with a partisan attack on critics.

“The president resorted to his old playbook of discredited rhetoric about the war on terror and political attacks, as his own political fortunes and credibility diminish,” Reid said.

But Bush is not the only administration official calling critics to account, only the highest-ranking one.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, known more for diplomacy than political belligerence, asserted at a press briefing this week that the Bush administration had acted in good faith in pointing to intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

“I point out that some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They stated that belief and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people,” Hadley said. “For those critics to ignore their own past statements exposes the hollowness of their current attacks.”

Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman was even more pointed in singling out Democrats now criticizing the president. He targeted several who are weighing campaigns for president in 2008 – Sens. Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Joe Biden of Delaware – as they challenge the war.

“I’m not sure if the Democratic leaders were brainwashed” for their initial votes for war, Mehlman said this week. “Or could it be cut-and-run politics based on what the polls show?”

Democrats contend, however, that it was the administration’s statements, now shown to be baseless, that caused them to believe the worst about Saddam’s arsenal. They cite such comments as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice’s references to a “mushroom cloud” and Vice President Dick Cheney’s assurance that Saddam was working toward a nuclear arsenal.

American support for the war, as well as confidence in the president’s integrity, has diminished over the last two years. Bush’s situation is complicated by the recent indictment of a senior White House aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstruction of justice in a federal probe of the disclosure of the identity of a CIA agent. That agent, Valerie Plame, is married to a former ambassador who accused the White House in 2003 of manipulating intelligence leading to the war.

In polls taken from August through October, the Gallup Poll has found an average of 54 percent of Americans surveyed calling the war a mistake.

And a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed a majority for the first time questioning Bush’s integrity. Just 40 percent said they view Bush as honest and trustworthy, a 13 percentage point slide from 18 months ago.

Fifty-eight percent voiced doubt about the president’s honesty, the first time that measure has topped 50 percent in the ABC survey.

Democrats have noted that even some Republicans have questioned the handling of intelligence before the war. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., has backed an investigation “because I thought we needed the answers to whether intelligence was misused, intentionally or unintentionally.”

As the president has used military audiences many times before to underscore his case for war, Bush employed an Army base Friday as the setting for his new campaign, with uniformed troops assembled behind him to bolster the image of a strong commander in chief.

And as he has before, Bush made repeated references to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a reminder of the enemy Americans still face. “We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won,” said Bush, reiterating his claim that Iraq has become the “central front” in that war.

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