Top White House officials on Sunday described a subsequently discredited statement by President Bush about Baghdad’s nuclear programme as a minor ‘‘mistake’’ that should not undermine the administration’s credibility. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld both defended the decision to unseat Saddam Hussein, arguing that the statement in Bush’s State of the Union address, alleging that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Africa, was a tiny piece of the rationale for war.In several television appearances, Rice repeatedly described the suspect claim as just ‘‘16 words’’ in a presidential speech that emphasised a long list of compelling evidence. ‘‘There was a mistake here,’’ Rice said on CNN. ‘‘Something went wrong, and we will all go back and redouble our efforts to see that something like this doesn’t happen again.’’ On NBC’s Meet the Press, Rumsfeld said it was clear that ‘‘in retrospect, the President would not have said it, and I would not have said it. But the idea that that has any central role in the intelligence community’s assessment of what was going on in Iraq would be a misunderstanding”.
