George Bush offered Tony Blair a pass on participating in the invasion and liberation of Iraq, afraid of the political effect it would have on the British PM's stability, Bush revealed yesterday in a speech at Kansas State University. The London Telegraph reports on Bush's statement for the benefit of British voters:

President George W Bush has revealed he offered Tony Blair the chance not go to war in Iraq, but the Prime Minister turned it down.

Mr Bush said he made the offer amid concerns about the stability of the Labour Government in the months before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"He [Blair] was worried about his Government and so was I, and I told him one time, 'I don't want your Government to fall, and if you're worried about it just go ahead and pull out of the coalition so you save your Government'," said Mr Bush.

"And he said to me, 'I have made my commitment on behalf of the great country of Britain and I'm not changing my mind'.

"He said, 'I'm not interested in politics, what I'm interested in is doing the right thing.'

It's an admirable anecdote that shows Blair as a stalwart advocate for the liberation of the oppressed Iraqi people, but perhaps a story that might have some less-than-pleasant ramifications for Blair back home. He has been ridiculed as Bush's "poodle" in the European press. This development might earn him more respect as his own man in terms of policy but burden him with more of the political opposition to the war itself ... if that's possible.

The revelation came from the new effort by the White House to push the exposed NSA program as an asset for the war on terror and a program that has to be continued as a critical part of the national defense. In his presentation, Bush and Gen. Michael Hayden laid out their explanation of the program and the efforts made to ensure that the intercepts only dealt with international calls involving suspected terrorists:

Mr. Bush, for the first time, called his decision to authorize the interceptions part of a "terrorist surveillance program," a phrase meant to convey that only members of Al Qaeda and their associates were falling into the net of the security agency. General Hayden took issue with many news reports that have referred to a "domestic spying" program. Saying the program is not really domestic in nature, he emphasized that it was limited to calls and e-mail in which one end of the communication was outside the United States and which "we have a reasonable basis to believe involve Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates."

At the same time, General Hayden acknowledged that some purely domestic communications might be accidentally intercepted. The New York Times reported last month that this appeared to have happened in a small number of cases because of the difficulties posed by globalized communications in determining whether a phone call or e-mail message was truly "international."

"If there were ever an anomaly, and we discovered that there had been an inadvertent intercept of a domestic-to-domestic call, that intercept would be destroyed and not reported," General Hayden said.

Thanks to the NYT, we now have the ridiculous spectacle of a wartime President going on the road, having to sell the idea that gathering intelligence about terrorist cells in the United States is within his authority -- when we just had a Congressional commission complain that both this and the previous administration didn't do enough to gather intelligence on domestic terror cells to prevent 9/11. The Democrats used that to attack the President during the last election, and now they want to attack him for protecting America in the next election.

If that strategy sounds like winner, one has to have "Dean" as a surname.

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