Fuelled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's blasts at the Bush administration, the US Senate's leading liberal Democrat on Wednesday accused the Republican White House of breaking faith with Americans by forcing them into an unnecessary war with Iraq.
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said President George W. Bush and his advisers capitalised on the fear created by the September 11, 2001, attacks and put "a spin on the truth to justify a war that could well become one of the worst blunders in more than two centuries of American foreign policy."
"If Congress and the American people knew the whole truth, America never would have gone to war," Kennedy said in a speech to the Centre for American Progress.
He said the administration "has broken faith with the American people, aided and abetted by a congressional majority willing to pursue ideology at any price, even the price of distorting the truth."
He also said the Iraq war has made the effort to stop terrorism more difficult. "We knocked al Qaeda down in the war in Afghanistan, but we let it regroup by going to war in Iraq," he said of Osama bin Laden's network, blamed for the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Kennedy said the statements by O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, that the president focused on ousting Saddam Hussein from his first days in office "revealed what many of us have long suspected. Despite protestations to the contrary, the president and his senior aides began the march to war in Iraq in the earliest days of the administration."
O'Neill, ousted about a year ago in a shake-up of Bush's economic team, has sparked a firestorm with interviews and his contributions to a book depicting a disengaged president and an administration bent on toppling Saddam long before Bush cited Iraq as a terrorist threat after the September 11 attacks.
The White House has lashed out at O'Neill, launching an investigation on whether he disclosed secret documents.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday said the idea that Bush came to office "with a predisposition to invade Iraq ... I think is a total misunderstanding of the situation." Bush decided to invade Iraq in March last year "after trying everything else in the world," Rumsfeld said.
But Kennedy said the administration's "agenda was clear: find a rationale to end Saddam's regime," and he said the White House timed its announcements on Iraq to influence 2002 congressional elections.
"War in Iraq was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. It was a product they were methodically rolling out," he said.
Kennedy branded the administration as "breathtakingly arrogant," convinced "they know what is in America's interest, but they refuse to debate it honestly."