US President George W. Bush marketed the war with Iraq as a "political product" and broke faith with the American people by forcing them into an unnecessary conflict, a leading Democratic lawmaker said on Wednesday.
In remarks fueled by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's blasts at the Republican White House, US Senator Edward Kennedy said Bush and his advisers capitalized on fear from the Sept. 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."
Speaking to the Center for American Progress, the longtime liberal Democrat said the Republican 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."
Kennedy, who served in the US Senate since 1962, said Bush timed the Iraq debate to divide Democrats and help Republicans win 2002 congressional elections by distracting attention "from the troubled economy and the troubled effort to capture" Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaeda network was blamed for the September 2001 attacks.
Bush should not have sent US troops "in harm's way in Iraq for ideological reasons and on a timetable based on the marketing of a political product," he said.
With the White House intending to hand over power to an Iraqi administration by the end of June, Kennedy said the US now cannot "simply walk away from the wreckage of a war we never should have fought so that President Bush can wage a political campaign based on dubious boasts of success."
He also said the Iraq war set back the effort to stop terrorism.
"We knocked al-Qaeda down in the war in Afghanistan, but we let it regroup by going to war in Iraq."
US House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, called Kennedy's speech a "hateful attack" that "insulted the president's patriotism."
Kennedy said critical statements by Bush's first treasury secretary showed that "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 Sept. 11 attacks.
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