An aide to President Bush criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats Tuesday as the White House tried to seize the political offensive before November’s elections.
Peter Wehner, director of the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, took the unusual step of publicly accusing Pelosi and half a dozen other prominent Democrats of perpetuating “falsehoods” about Bush’s Iraq policy.
Wehner, a former writer for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, ran the policy shop at Empower America, a conservative think tank, before joining the Bush administration. Last month, he issued a detailed rebuttal to conservative critics of the Iraq war, including George Will and William F. Buckley Jr.
“What a strange world it is,” Wehner said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage.
“The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred,” he wrote. “It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.”
Mark Halperin, political editor of ABC News, said the White House is trying to counter Democratic criticism of Republicans on Iraq.
“Democrats have to root, root, root for bad news,” Halperin said inhis daily political memo, known as The Note. “And no bad news source is better for the Democrats’ election prospects than the bad news from Iraq.”
Wehner accused Democrats of “revisionist history” by spreading “urban legends” about Bush’s Iraq policy.
These include charges by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., former Vice President Al Gore and former President Jimmy Carter that Bush misled the nation to justify war. Kennedy and Gore also accused the Bush administration of pressuring the intelligence community to skew its analysis of Iraq.
Other Democrats singled out by Wehner include Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, Rep. John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, and former Sen. Max Cleland, of Georgia, all of whom said Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. Wehner also criticized Pelosi for accusing Bush of championing Middle East democratization as an “after-the-fact justification” for war.
Wehner said Democrats constantly repeat such allegations while ignoring substantial progress in Iraq.
“Iraqis can participate in three historic elections, pass the most liberal constitution in the Arab world, and form a unity government despite terrorist attacks and provocations,” he said. “Yet for some critics of the president, these are minor matters.”
