Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq
Bob Woodwards new book, "State of Denial", describes a White House at war with itself over the conflict in Iraq with Bush ignoring pleas from a top Iraq adviser who stated that thousands more troops were needed to combat the insurgency.
The book says President Bush’s top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation in Iraq.
As late as November 2003, Mr. Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: “I don’t want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don’t think we are there yet.”
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts-and-bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq — a task that was initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon — and so hostile toward Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that President Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls. The American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility anymore” to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.
It's also interesting to note that Bush declined to be interviewed for this book having made himself freely available for the two preceding books by Woodward. It also describes the lengths that Cheney went to in order to "prove" that Iraq possessed WMD.
Vice President Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite coordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds.It is known that Powell was ambivalent about Bush's plan to invade Iraq but what is surprising is Woodward's claim that George Tenet shared Powell's viewpoint, although it is claimed that Tenet did not make these views known to Bush.
What does promise to be explosive though, especially in the light of Clinton's claim that the Bush administration did not do enough to capture bin Laden prior to 9-11, are Woodward's claims regarding Rumsfeld and Rice:
It's a wonder that a man who thought al Qaeda were indulging in "an elaborate deception plan" and a woman who seemed not to take "the warnings seriously" should remain in their positions after the worst terrorist attack in US history, but that appears to be the story that Woodward is telling.Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
We can expect the Republican attack dogs to be set on Woodward any day now.
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