President Bush and his supporters are in attack mode over Iraq. They're claiming that critics who accuse the administration of hyping the case for war are attempting to "rewrite history." In an unusual Veterans Day speech, Bush said, "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support." He went on to say that Congress had "the same intelligence" the administration had. That, dear readers, is an audacious effort to rewrite history.

There were two large errors in Bush's statement. First, what Congress had was intelligence scrubbed of all the doubts, warnings and caveats raised by the intelligence community.

Second, Congress did not vote for the definite use of force, let alone for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. It authorized the use of force if necessary to ensure that Iraq either gave up its weapons of mass destruction or proved it didn't have any.

In October 2002, when Congress passed the resolution, even Bush saw it (or at least indicated he did) primarily as a tactic for putting maximum pressure on the U.N. Security Council to pass a second, tougher resolution warning Iraq that it faced punitive action if it did not cooperate better with U.N. weapons inspectors. In a typical comment, two days after the resolution passed, Bush said, "But I am very firm in my desire to make sure that Saddam is disarmed. Hopefully, we can do this peacefully. The use of the military is my last choice, is my last desire."

At the time, the administration was asserting that Saddam had large stores of chemical and biological weapons, and that he had reconstituted his program to develop nuclear weapons. There was fairly broad agreement about the biological and chemical weapons but quite a lot of disagreement over the far more worrisome nuclear program. The inspections were seen as the means by which the intelligence could be empirically verified.

Through late 2002 and early 2003, the inspectors in Iraq were, in fact, doing quite a good job despite noncooperation from Saddam, but they were not finding WMD of any kind. The leaders of the U.N. effort, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, were reporting this fact to the Security Council but saying that they needed several more months to exhaust their effort.

The Bush administration then went on the attack. John Bolton, now U.N. ambassador, was dispatched to Europe to seek ElBaradei's removal from his top post at the International Atomic Energy Agency. Vigorous efforts were made to undermine Blix's credibility, and the United States expressed a lack of confidence in the inspections regime. It seemed clear that Bush wanted the inspections cut short because they were undermining the American case for war.

In a March 8, 2003, editorial, we argued, "Rather than turn immediately to war, Bush should use the demonstrable success of his approach to seek unity with the Security Council on a deadline for Iraq to comply fully with the requirements of Security Council resolution 1441." The Bush administration wasn't having any of it, however. To war it went, without exhausting the inspections process and without the support of either the United Nations or many members of Congress who voted for the October resolution.

Since the start of the war, massive evidence has accumulated about how the administration cherry-picked intelligence, hyped nonexistent links between Iraq and Al-Qaida and sought to punish truth-telling critics. All that leaves both the American people and quite a few members of Congress feeling at least misled and possibly lied to. There's ample justification for that feeling, and it involves not an iota of rewriting the record.