Bush Fails to Reassure

"'In the old days, if the U.S. government had come out and said, "We've got this, here's our assessment," reasonable people would have taken it at face value,' [one administration official] said of the Baghdad briefing. 'That's never going to happen again.' . . .

"In yesterday's White House news conference, Bush grappled with the issue head-on. 'What makes you so certain,' a reporter asked Bush, of the military's charge that 'the highest levels of Tehran's government' are responsible for shipments of lethal weapons to Iraq for use against U.S. troops?

"Bush contradicted the military's account, saying, 'We don't know . . . whether the head leaders of Iran ordered' it.

"'But here's my point,' he added. 'Either they knew or didn't know, and what matters is, is that [the weapons] they're there.'

"Yet, as questions that have peppered senior officials all week suggest, what matters in the post-Iraq invasion era is whether the administration can prove it."

Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "Bush has always supported a faith-based initiative, but his recitation of beliefs in the East Room yesterday -- he listed no fewer than 18 principles he holds to be true -- sounded less like a question-and-answer session than a reading of the Nicene Creed. The only thing the president did not believe in was answering the questions he was asked. . . .

"The president seemed petulant in his refusal to answer questions; he was, after all, the one who summoned reporters to the White House for the purpose of questioning him. Probably, it was the tone of the questions that set him off: While Bush freely voiced his beliefs, the reporters seemed disinclined to accept his statements of faith. . . .

"CNN's Ed Henry still didn't share Bush's confidence. 'What assurances can you give the American people that the intelligence this time will be accurate?' he asked.

"'Ed,' Bush vouched, 'we know they're there.'"

Wolf Blitzer talked to Henry on CNN afterwards: "All right, Ed Henry, you're at the White House right now. And he really didn't answer your specific question about the discrepancy between what he and General Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, are saying now, that they don't know if the highest officials in the Iranian government actually authorized these shipments of explosives to Iraqi Shiites, even though Sunday morning in Baghdad, U.S. officials were making that specific charge.

"HENRY: That's right, Wolf.

"I mean, look, this all started with the administration itself, on Sunday, making these claims that the highest levels of the Iranian government were involved. That's why we've been pursuing these questions for the last couple of days.