US President George W. Bush acknowledged on Wednesday his responsibility for the discredited US charge that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa for his nuclear weapon program.

It is his first admission of culpability since the outbreak of the "intelligence-gate" crisis in the United States.

Bush's stance is expected to help repair his dented popularity among the US public on the eve of the coming presidential election.

To give legitimacy to his cry for war against Saddam's regime, Bush accused Iraq of possessing and developing weapons of mass destruction.

In his State of the Union Address in January, Bush claimed that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program, his main argument for the US-led war against Baghdad.

However, Bush has yet to provide evidence for such accusations.

The president has thus been criticized in the United States for deliberately exaggerating the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and his administration has therefore been under strong domestic pressure.

To calm down the false intelligence-invoked political turbulence, the White House attempted to find some low-profile scapegoats.

Bush and his top aids originally blamed Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet for failing to have the unsupported accusations against Baghdad removed from the speech. Later, US Deputy National Security adviser Stephen Hadley claimed a share of the responsibility for the false intelligence.

However, it seems that the crisis has not shown any sign of disappearing in the United States.

Bush's accepting responsibility can be seen as an attempt to ease the immense pressure he is under as a result of the false intelligence.

On the eve of the US presidential election, doubt over the credibility of a candidate will have a negative impact on his race for the presidency.

It still remains unknown whether Bush's efforts can extricate him from the damage wrought by the intelligence crisis.

But one thing for sure: the US is determined to hunt down Saddam whether Washington's charges against him are true or not.

(China Daily August 1, 2003)