"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," he told a Veterans Day crowd of former and active US military personnel in Pennsylvania.
Unabated violence in Iraq has overshadowed political progress there,
helping to drive the President Bush’s poll numbers to their worst levels ever, as the number of US soldiers killed there passed the symbolic milestone of 2,000.
And with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction at the core of
Bush's case for war, opposition Democrats have redoubled their charges that he intentionally exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam to justify the conflict.
President Bush countered that the United Nations, intelligence services around the world, and many Democrats at home all agreed with him before the US-led March 2003 invasion that Saddam possessed unconventional weapons.
"While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision, or the conduct
of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war
began," he said at an army depot.
The president pointed to a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation
that found "no evidence" of political pressure on intelligence analysts to
change their findings about Iraq's suspected arsenals.
Democrats hit back
But Democrats have noted that neither that probe, nor a bipartisan panel
known as the Silberman-Robb commission, looked at whether the administration misused the intelligence they received.
Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy was quick to hit back, calling the speech
"a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those
who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence."
"Each day, the American people learn more and more about the truth," he
said in a statement. "Its time for the president to restore the trust of the
American people in their leaders by coming clean about the war."
A spate of recent polls have shown deep and growing pessimism about the
situation in Iraq and found that many in the United States now think that Bush
deliberately misstated Saddam's capabilities.