From Reuters
By Caren Bohan

U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday challenged what he called public “misimpressions” about Iraq as he battled a gloomy assessment of the war in an intelligence report and the fallout from a book portraying him as in denial over it.

With five weeks to go before midterm congressional elections, and Democrats seizing on both revelations, Bush said the leaks of a U.S. intelligence report indicating the Iraq war had increased the threat of terrorism created “a lot of misimpressions about the document’s conclusions.”

The president has since declassified 3-1/2 pages of the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the 16 U.S. spy agencies.

The report’s judgment that the Iraq war has become a “cause celebre” for Islamic extremists was seen by Democrats as bolstering their campaign argument that Bush’s policies in Iraq had put Americans at greater risk.

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