Bush Knew Of Disagreement Within Administration RE: Aluminum Tubes

Murray Waas is reporting that Karl Rove "cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war [with Iraq] had been challenged within the administration."

Then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley determined that Bush had been informed prior to his 2003 State of the Union address that the whole "aluminum tubes being used to build nukes" story might be a load of bull, which caused Rove to be concerned about what would happen if the public knew about this:

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

Wow -- most campaigns would try to counter allegations that their candidate is a complete moron who is perpetually out of the loop on important issues such as whether or not this country goes to war. But not the Bush campaign.

Indeed, Rove apparently viewed Bush's idiocy as a positive attribute that would actually help his boss get "reelected." God help us.