Bush Fails to Reassure

"And it really appears that the administration is not on the same page, that they're all over the map on this.

"Now, I'm getting pushed back from very senior White House officials saying look, this is much ado about very little.

"But the fact of the matter is that the president today really seemed to be pulling back from what those officials said Sunday -- Wolf.

"BLITZER: Is -- is this, as some of the president's critics are suggesting -- a pretext or a possibility of a step leading toward actual military confrontation with Iran?

"HENRY: Look, the president insists absolutely not, that he has no intention of going to war with Iran. He said that again today. He's been saying that for weeks, as have a whole bunch of top officials.

"Bottom line is that all of this talk about intelligence, what do they have, when did they have it, it's obviously reminding a lot of people about the buildup to the war in Iraq. There are a lot of lingering questions of credibility from that and that's why the president is getting these questions now -- Wolf.

"BLITZER: Ed Henry doing his job at the White House for us, asking important questions of the president of the United States.

"Ed, thank you."

The Coverage

Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush bluntly accused Iranian agents yesterday of providing sophisticated explosives to kill U.S. troops in Iraq but said he did not know whether they were acting on orders of the Islamic republic's leaders and denied using the allegations as a pretext to go to war with Tehran. . . .

"The president spent much of the hour-long televised session in the East Room addressing skepticism about his government's assertions regarding Iran and fears of a widening regional conflict."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Marc Santora write in the New York Times: "Mr. Bush's remarks amounted to his most specific accusation to date that Iran was undermining security in Iraq. They appeared to be part of a concerted effort by the White House to present a clearer, more direct case that Iran was supplying the potent weapons -- and to push back against criticism that the intelligence used in reaching the conclusions was not credible. . . .

"Some experts said the question of Iran's responsibility remained important. 'There's a big difference between saying that there is a rogue element doing things and then asking the Iranian government to rein it in, as opposed to saying this is a calculated deliberate strategy of the Iranian government,' said Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'That has very different implications in terms of how do you hold Iran culpable.'