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By Adel Safty, Special to Gulf News
Published: September 08, 2008, 00:04

US President George W. Bush skipped the Republican convention last week, and sent a brief video message of support for the Republican presidential nominee John McCain. The convention offered Bush, whom the New York Times described as "the most unpopular president in recent history, a chance to revel, though remotely, in the kind of affection he rarely gets these days."

Bush must also be relieved that with media attention focused on the presidential race, he seems to have weathered the storm raised last month by yet another book accusing his administration of fabrication of evidence to justify the Iraq war.

In his new book The Way of the World, Pulitzer-Prize reporter Ron Suskind makes two accusations against the Bush administration. First, that the Bush administration received credible information from the British intelligence (who were informed by Iraq's intelligence chief Tahir Habbush) that Saddam Hussain had no weapons of mass destruction. Bush, and especially Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative entourage dismissed the information because they were intent on waging war.

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