WASHINGTON: The Iraq war that boosted US President George W. Bush’s domestic popularity in the spring has started to turn into a political liability this summer.

As the US death toll has mounted in chaotic post-war Iraq, Democrats, including nine White House hopefuls, have turned up the heat on Bush for using flawed intelligence to justify the invasion.

“It’s a disgrace that the case for war seems to have been based on shoddy intelligence, hyped intelligence and even false intelligence,” thundered veteran Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy.

“All the evidence points to the conclusion that they put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.”

The White House has admitted that a claim Bush made in his January State of the Union address, of Saddam Hussein shopping for uranium in Africa, had been considered dubious for months.

With no weapons of mass destruction found so far in Iraq and overstretched US troops coming under daily enemy fire, the pre-emptive war has put the Bush administration on the defensive.

The media has reported growing frustration among many of the 148,000 US troops now policing an increasingly hostile Iraq, and their families, who expected them home months ago.

“If (Defence Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld were here, I’d ask him for his resignation,” one disgruntled soldier in Iraq told ABC’s TV’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday.

New Central Command chief General John Abizaid later suggested the soldier would be punished for his remark, but also pledged that thousands of US infantry troops would leave Iraq by September.

Rumsfeld himself last week admitted the US could use the help of the United Nations and soldiers from NATO allies France and Germany in Iraq. The two nations that led European opposition to the war wasted no time in declining the request.

The US media, which broadly supported the war, has smelled blood and seized onto Bush’s “credibility gap” and the troubled occupation that, Rumsfeld said, costs $3.9 billion a month.

Left-wing activist group misleader.org has run TV attack ads accusing Bush of an “unprecedented deception” and campaigned for a commission looking into the intelligence controversy.

Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, in his last briefing for Bush this week, complained of a “media feeding frenzy that misinterprets why America went to war”.

His successor, Scott McClellan, was again hammered on the issue in a press conference on Wednesday and said, “The last thing anyone should do is politicize this issue by rewriting history”.

CIA chief George Tenet, meanwhile, faced a closed-door congressional panel over the Africa intelligence claim, for which he claimed responsibility last week.

The Washington Post on Wednesday pointed out that “almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by UN inspectors in Iraq” by the time Bush rallied the nation to war.

Bush’s approval rating has dropped nine points to a still respectable 59 per cent in 18 days, according to a weekend Washington Post/ABC poll.

The nine Democratic 2004 presidential contenders — energized by consistent war-opponent Howard Dean of Vermont — are now falling over each other to criticize Bush’s go-it-alone attack on Iraq.

“President Bush is repeating two dangerous habits: misleading the American people and ducking responsibility for his mistakes,” said one of them, Senator Joseph Lieberman from Connecticut.

They have also attacked Bush on what threatens to become his bigger Achilles heel — the economy, which has stubbornly failed to recover strength and seen unemployment rise to 6.2 per cent.

This week the White House admitted that the downturn, higher defence and security spending, and its massive tax cuts will cause the 2003 budget deficit to balloon to a record $455 billion.

The red ink is a “a legitimate subject of concern,” White House budget director Joshua Bolten admitted. He vowed the budget gap would be halved by 2006 without detailing how this would be done.

Despite the current woes, Bush enjoys a major advantage: fund- raising muscle. In the past three months, he raised $34.4 million — more than his nine Democratic opponents combined.—dpa