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The career diplomat wrote an article for the New York Times disputing the claim, and the White House later acknowledged: "The sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address."

"At the same time, of course, the administration launched a campaign to defame and discredit me by compromising the identity of my wife as a CIA operative," Wilson charged.

In addition, "those of us who know something about the region and American national security policy allowed ourselves to be driven from the public square by a coterie of ideologues who used smear tactics and character assassination to mask the feebleness of their ideas."

After accusing Congress of getting "swept up in the post-9/11 need to confront the enemy, any enemy, even the wrong enemy," Wilson criticized the press for utterly failing "to hold the administration to account."

Wilson said, "We must not take our eye off the ball in Iraq," a situation he referred to as "a mess, and by all accounts not soon to improve." While "not advocating one approach over another," he said, "our continued presence will, however, guarantee more American deaths and more people who hate us for what we have done."

To resolve the situation, the former ambassador concluded that "we should elicit the views of Iraq's neighbors, our allies, the international community at large and experts in this country and not just the same cabal of ideologues whose policy prescriptions foisted upon a frightened nation in the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of 9/11 have been demonstrated to be terribly flawed."

(Cybercast News Service Correspondent Jered Ede contributed to this report.)

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