The Truth Is Out There . . .

FINALLY. For much of the past week, the White House has been engaged in an aggressive effort to defend the case for war in Iraq. Thus far, it has mainly pointed out the obvious: In the months and years before the invasion, many of those who now accuse the White House of misleading the country to war themselves were making precisely the same claims about the threat from Iraq as the Bush administration.

President George W. Bush accused his critics of "rewriting history." Vice President Dick Cheney called the attacks a low point of his three decades in public life. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reminded Pentagon reporters of what Clinton administration officials were saying not so long ago. The White House press office distributed point-by-point rebuttals of claims from Democratic partisans. On Thursday, a senior White House official circulated among conservative opinion leaders a devastating eleven-page response to an error-riddled New York Times editorial. The White House created a new Iraq-focused rapid response team to monitor and counter the seemingly endless stream of misinformation from political opponents and misreporting from a political press.

The White House has relied on already-public documents--such as the Duelfer Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Robb-Silbermann Report on Iraq Intelligence, and Phase I of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report--to make two points: (1) Bush administration policymakers made claims that were consistent with the consensus views of the U.S. intelligence community, and (2) there is no evidence that Bush administration policymakers "pressured" intelligence analysts to produce these assessments.

That effort was necessary. It is not sufficient.