Falling out with the President: the devious world of George Bush

Rupert Cornwell - in today's Independent newspaper - is giving his critique of Scott McLellan's new book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" and is in agreement with most people that this:

"is no falsely touted insider memoir, jazzed up with a few titillating anecdotes to boost sales. It is a 341-page disquisition on Mr Bush, on his misbegotten war in Iraq, and on his entire conduct of the presidency, which Mr McClellan says was built on the use of propaganda, and on the technique of government as permanent campaign.

"History appears poised to confirm," he writes in arguably the most damning paragraph of a book full of them, "that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now ... What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

It's hard to overstate how damning this indictment is, coming from a man who owes his entire Washington career to Bush, a man who was part of the "Texas mafia" which Bush brought to Washington.

Indeed, the only comfort the Bush team can take from this is the fact that their boss has fallen so far that even this searing indictment of his job as president is unlikely to damage him further. When you've hit the floor, there's simply no further to fall.

However, Cornwell picks up on passages that have, so far, not been reported on which go to the centre of the Bush presidency and where it all went wrong.

In fact, Mr McClellan's portrait of the President – a man he says he still respects and admires – is far more nuanced. Which of course only makes it more telling. Mr Bush comes across in now familiar guise, as a skilled politician, possessed of charm and an engaging wit, who is, "plenty smart enough to be President". On the other hand, he is utterly incurious and uninquisitive on policy matters, preferring to rely on gut instinct than a detailed sifting of the arguments.

For the 43rd President, a decision once taken is always right. The approach reflects not only Mr Bush's ingrained stubbornness but his ability to deceive not only others, but also himself.

That's utterly damning for the simple fact that it rings so true. The Bush presidency has been one where Bush thinks that once "the Decider" has made the call then it is the duty of everyone else to make what he wants happen.

And as for his ability to deceive himself as much as others, McLellan offers a damning example:

Mr McClellan offers as illustration a moment on the campaign trail in 1999, when he heard the governor/candidate talking on the phone to a friend about reports that he had used cocaine in his youth. Apparently, Mr Bush remarked that ... "the media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumours. The truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back then, and I just don't remember."

In 2000 voters – battle-hardened by having to confront Bill Clinton's marijuana use ("I did not inhale") and explain to their curious children the finer points of the Monica Lewinsky affair – did not seem greatly bothered. They assumed Mr Bush might indeed have indulged in cocaine, just as he had indulged in the bottle which he had emphatically given up. But Mr McClellan drew a different lesson from the episode. "I remember thinking to myself, how can that be?" he writes. "How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn't make a lot of sense."

On the other hand, Mr Bush wasn't, "the kind of person to flat-out lie." So, McClellan concludes, "I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine ... I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true. And his reason for doing so is fairly obvious – political convenience." And thus, by implication at least, it was with Iraq and Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

If Bush could convince himself that he couldn't remember whether or not he had ever used cocaine, then he really was capable of convincing himself of anything.

And that brings us to Iraq. Wolfowitz had already confessed to Vanity Fair that WMD were not the reason for the invasion, but merely "something everyone could agree on". McLellan goes further stating that the reason for the war was "the neoconservative dream of creating a democratic Iraq that would pave the way for an enduring peace in the region."

In other words, the war was for Israel, that continual neo-con obsession. But how does one sell such a war for such a purpose? It's here that McLellan sticks the knife firmly between the shoulder blades of his former friends.

But the White House had to sell the war as necessary because of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. They accordingly took a different tack, not of "out-and-out deception", but of "shading the truth". This was achieved by "innuendo and implication", and by "intentionally ignoring intelligence to the contrary".

They simply made a decision to ignore any evidence which might prevent their war. That's something which we have always suspected and which McLellan has just confirmed.

There's nothing of stunning originality here, what's mind boggling is that it comes from a former member of Bush's inner circle, it's coming from someone who was there at the time. And he's not only saying that Bush and Co. conned the US into the Iraq war, he goes as far as to say that, if Bush knew then what he knows now, that Bush would never have gone to war in the first place:

"I know the President pretty well," Mr McClellan writes. "If he had been given a crystal ball in which he could have foreseen the cost of war, more than 4,000 American troops killed, 30,000 injured, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, he would never have made the decision to invade, whatever he says or feels he has to say publicly today."

But his criticism is not limited to Bush alone:

What Happened delivers tough criticism of the President's once vaunted national security team. One member of it of course was Dick Cheney, referred to by Mr McClellan as "the magic man" who somehow "always seemed to get his way" on every issue that mattered to him, be it the war, boosting the executive power of the presidency, or the harsh treatment of detainees.

Even more damning is his verdict on Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser in the run-up to the invasion. Her main talent, Mr McClellan suggests, was a Teflon quality. Whatever went wrong, "she was somehow able to keep her hands clean," even when the problems related to areas for which she was responsible, such as the WMD rationale for war (including the infamous "16 words" in the 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa, that led to the CIA/Valerie Plame affair) and the planning for post-war occupation. History, he predicts, will not be kind to Ms Rice. But "she knew well how to adapt to potential trouble, dismiss brooding problems and always come out looking like a star".

History, I suspect, will not be kind to any of them. Rarely does an administration get it this wrong on so many different levels. Rarely does an administration act with such arrogance and so little common sense. This really has been the first Frat presidency, run by a man who gained his position solely through his father's achievements and who governed based on the notion that he didn't care what anyone - including history - thought of his actions.

A man who could convince himself that he didn't know if he had ever tried cocaine, really could convince himself of anything. And a presidency which was not based on facts was always going to hit the wall. At times like this I am very proud to be part of the reality based community which Bush and his cohorts so despised:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It was that mindset which defined Bush's presidency and which led it to be the unqualified disaster which McLellan describes.

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Tags: McLellan, Bush, Iraq war, What Happened, Rove, Cheney, Rice, lies, Wolfowitz

Ex-Aide Details a Loss of Faith in the President

Matthew Dowd, the Democrat who had so much faith in President Bush's message that he changed parties to join Mr Bush's brain trust and worked for six years to help him get elected and keep him there - eventually being made Bush's chief campaign strategist - has spoken out saying that his faith in the President was "misplaced".

He has called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Bush's leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”

Dowd is the first member of Bush's inner circle to break so publicly with him.

He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.

Dowd was one of the people who helped Bush get re-elected in 2004, in part by labelling John Kerry as "a flip-flopper", although he has become so disillusioned with Bush's handling of the Iraq crisis that he has since written - although not submitted - an op-ed piece entitled "Kerry was right", in which he argues that Kerry's demand that the US should withdraw from Iraq was actually the right call.

This is actually indicative of the way many of Bush's past supporters are starting to fall away, what makes this one especially interesting is that Dowd actually worked to get Bush elected and was a member of the inner circle.

You'll remember that Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman, who both sat on the Defence Policy Board, turned on Bush in November last year charging his administration with incompetence.

Asked if he would still have pushed for war knowing what he knows now, Mr Perle, a leading hawk in the Reagan administration, said: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?', I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'."

"I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent," Mr Adelman said.

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

And now we have yet another true believer speaking out, saying that he was for many years "in denial" about the kind of leader Bush actually was. He also states that it was an accumulation of very many factors that eventually convinced him that Bush was a divider rather than a uniter has he had previously claimed. He cites the handling of Katrina, the refusal to fire Rumsfeld after the discovery of torture at Abu Ghraib, and Bush's attempts to have John Bolton confirmed as US Ambassador to United Nations as all incidents which led him to realise that Bush was not interested in seeking consensus with the Democrats.

He said he came to believe Mr. Bush’s views were hardening, with the reinforcement of his inner circle. But, he said, the person “who is ultimately responsible is the president.” And he gradually ventured out with criticism, going so far as declaring last month in a short essay in Texas Monthly magazine that Mr. Bush was losing “his gut-level bond with the American people,” and breaking more fully in this week’s interview.

“If the American public says they’re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,” Mr. Dowd said. “They’re saying, ‘Get out of Iraq.’ ”

As Bush continues on his, "I'm the decider - my way or the highway" style of leadership, I fully expect more and more of his former colleagues to break away from him. Bush now appears to be listening to small group of hard core neo-cons, the kind of people who possess the mentality that says that the US could have won the war in Vietnam if they had only held their nerve, and that they are applying this same mindset to Iraq.

What Bush perceives as leadership is actually nothing more than an extreme form of stubbornness. He seems to have forgotten that, in order to lead, it is important that you form a vision that people willingly want to follow. That has not been the case with Bush for quite a while now and it is only inevitable, when someone cannot express a vision that inspires others, that eventually even your greatest supporters start to notice the cracks in the facade and break away.

It was Thatcher's final lament, "Give me ten good men and true and I can get the job done". In the end, of course, it was Thatcher's inner circle that deserted her, repulsed by that which had once inspired them.

The longer Bush stubbornly pushes an unpopular war against the wish of the American public, the less even close associates will want to be associated with him, as is becoming clear from the Republican reaction to the Gonzales affair. Where once they would have rallied behind the Attorney General, they now have their eyes fixed on the 2008 finish line. And, with that in mind Bush is not only no longer a help, he's becoming a positive hindrance.

''Support for President Bush becomes less important the closer we get to the election,'' said Republican consultant Rich Galen. ''I'm not sure he'll be totally irrelevant, but certainly there will be more time, attention and money spent on propping up and-or defending the emerging front-runner, and then the party nominee, than the outgoing president.''

We can expect more people to distance themselves from Bush as time goes on. He thinks he's a leader, but what use is a leader if no-one is following?

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Tags: Matthew Dowd, Bush, Iraq war, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, 2008

When Resolve Turns Reckless

Kerry, at a time when Bush looks set to ignore the Baker Report and embark on a mission of madness rather than admit his defeat, gives us this timely article.

There's something much worse than being accused of "flip-flopping": refusing to flip when it's obvious that your course of action is a flop.

I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world's complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous -- it is immoral.

I'd rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

No one should be looking for vindication in what is happening in Iraq today. The lesson here is not that some of us were right about Iraq or that some of us were wrong. The lesson is simply that we need to change course rapidly rather than perversely use mistakes already made and lives already given as an excuse to make more mistakes and lose even more lives.

When young Americans are being killed and maimed, when the Middle East is on the brink of three civil wars, even the most vaunted "steadfastness" morphs pretty quickly into stubbornness, and resolve becomes recklessness. Changing tactics in the face of changing conditions on the ground, developing new strategies because the old ones don't work, is a hell of a lot smarter than the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again with the same tragic results.

Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial died after America's leaders knew that our strategy in that war was not working. Was then-secretary of defense Robert McNamara steadfast as he continued to send American troops to die for a war he knew privately could not be won? History does not remember his resolve -- it remembers his refusal to confront reality.

Clark Clifford, the man who succeeded McNamara in 1968, was handpicked by President Lyndon B. Johnson because he was a renowned hawk. But the new defense secretary reviewed the Vietnam policy and concluded that "we cannot realistically expect to achieve anything more through our military force, and the time has come to begin to disengage." By the time he left office, he had refused to endorse a further military buildup, supported the halt in our bombing, and urged negotiation and gradual disengagement. Was Clifford a flip-flopper of historic proportions, or did he in fact demonstrate the courage of his convictions?

We cannot afford to waste time being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory. We've already lost years being told that we have no choice but to stay the course of a failed policy.

This isn't a time for stubbornness, nor is it a time for halfway solutions -- or warmed-over "new" solutions that our own experience tells us will only make the problem worse. The Iraq Study Group tells us that "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." It joins the chorus of experts in and outside of Baghdad reminding us that there is no military solution to a political crisis. And yet, over the warnings of former secretary of state Colin Powell, Gen. John Abizaid and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington is considering a "troop buildup" option, sending more troops into harm's way to referee a civil war.

We have already tried a trimmed-down version of the McCain plan of indefinitely increasing troop levels. We sent 15,000 more troops to Baghdad last summer, and today the escalating civil war is even worse. You could put 100,000 more troops in tomorrow and you're only going to add to the number of casualties until Iraqis sit down together at a bargaining table and compromise. The barrel of a gun can't answer the question of how you force Iraqi nationalism to trump sectarian loyalty.

The only hope for stability lies in pushing Iraqis to forge a sustainable political agreement on federalism, distributing oil revenues and neutralizing sectarian militias. And that will happen only if we set a deadline to redeploy our troops.

Last May, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad gave the new Iraqi government six months to make the necessary political compromises. But a deadline with no teeth is only lip service. How many times do we have to see that Iraqi politicians respond only to firm, specific deadlines -- a deadline to transfer authority, deadlines to hold two elections and a referendum, and a deadline to form a government -- before we understand that it's time to make it clear that we are leaving and that we will not sacrifice American lives for the sake of squabbling Iraqi politicians?

Another case where steadfastness long ago gave way to stubbornness is our approach to Iraq's neighbors. Last week in Damascus, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and I met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. We were clear about U.S. expectations for change in his regime's policies, but we found potential for cooperation with Syria in averting a disaster in Iraq -- potential that should be put to the test. Washington can't remain on the sidelines, stubbornly clinging to a belief that talking to our enemies rewards hostile regimes.

Conversation is not capitulation. Until recently, it was widely accepted that good foreign policy demands a willingness to seize opportunities and change policy as the facts change. That's neither flip-flopping nor rudderless diplomacy -- it's strength.

How else could we end up with the famous mantra that "only Nixon could go to China"? For decades, Richard Nixon built his reputation as a China hawk. In 1960, he took John Kennedy to task for being soft on China. He called isolating China a "moral position" that "flatly rejected cowardly expediency." Then, when China broke with the Soviet Union during his presidency, he saw an opportunity to weaken our enemies and make Americans safer. His 1972 visit to China was a major U.S. diplomatic victory in the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan was no shape-shifter, either, but after calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire," he met repeatedly with its leaders. When Reagan saw an opportunity for cooperation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he reached out and tested our enemies' intentions. History remembers that he backed tough words with tough decisions -- and, yes, that he changed course even as he remained true to his principles.

President Bush and all of us who grew up in the shadows of World War II remember Winston Churchill -- his grit, his daring, his resolve. I remember listening to his speeches on a vinyl album in the pre-iPod era. Two years ago I spoke about Iraq at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., where Churchill had drawn a line between freedom and fear in his "iron curtain" speech. In preparation, I reread some of the many words from various addresses that made him famous. Something in one passage caught my eye. When Churchill urged, "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in," he added: "except to convictions of honour and good sense."

This is a time for such convictions.

jk@johnkerry.com

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tag: Bush, Iraq war, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report, John Kerry

'Out of touch' Bush wants to boost size of Army

George Bush has announced plans to increase the size of the US army to allow America to take on a "long struggle against radicals and extremists". This must increase speculation that he is going to send even more troops to Iraq in the hope of having some last ditch attempt at success. A move that has been dismissed by US generals on the ground as almost pointless.

With only a third of the electorate now supporting the war and with a Republican Party smarting from a decisive election defeat in which the war featured prominently, Bush is under pressure to find a way to end this disastrous campaign, although he has so far given no indication that he realises just how significantly his position on this conflict has been rejected.

Mr Bush's critics have seized on such a plan as more evidence that the President is out of touch with both the reality in Iraq and the mood of the country. "Bush does not seem to have understood the message of mid-term elections," said Andrew Burgin, spokesman of the Stop the War Coalition. "It's a fantasy to believe that the American people will agree to increased numbers of American troops being killed in Iraq .It's the same with [Tony] Blair and people like Margaret Beckett. The whole political class appears to be out of touch with how this war started, what is happening in Iraq now and what the future holds."

Mr Bush insisted that the US would "win" in Iraq, shifting from his position the previous day when he had said in a newspaper interview that America was neither winning or losing. He said his earlier comments were meant to reflect "that we were going to win, I believe that... My comments yesterday reflected the fact that we're not succeeding nearly as fast as I had wanted."

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military studies group, said there was no certainty that boosting troops numbers would result in success. "It's called war because you don't know what is going to happen and the enemy has some input," he said.

Bush seems unable to grasp the fact that he has lost this conflict. The Iraq Study Group bent over backwards in an attempt to find a set of circumstances in which he could withdraw and declare victory, but all indications are that Bush is likely to reject the findings of this bipartisan committee.

I know that Nancy Pelosi has ruled out impeachment hearings but, if Bush won't accept the findings of a committee that went out of it's way to find him an exit strategy that saved his face, then I don't see any other option for the US.

American influence is at it's lowest ebb, anti-American sentiment is raging across the globe, and the captain appears to be saying "steady at the wheel".

For the sake of the US as a nation, it is time to remove this man from office.

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tag: Bush, Iraq war, US foreign policy, "Stay the course", troop increase, James T Baker, overstretch, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report,

Iraq Panel to Urge Changes; Bush Briefed

It's quite astonishing to realise that the US involvement in Iraq has now lasted longer than their involvement in World War Two, highlighting the idiocy of Rumsfeldian predictions that it would all be over in a matter of weeks or months. Almost every prediction that the neo-cons made, from the length of the war to how it would fund itself, has proven to be horrendously wrong.

And yet, on the day that James Baker is finally to submit his long awaited Iraq Study Group report, we are told that Bush is to consider it only one of many recommendations.

"We're going to give it a careful review,'' White House press secretary Tony Snow said Tuesday. "As we have mentioned, there are other ongoing studies within the administration.''

A senior administration official said "there will be some disagreements but a lot we can work with,'' but offered no detail.

Bush has made it clear that he is opposed to any timetables for withdrawal, with a scaled withdrawal appearing to be one of Baker's recommendations.

The bipartisan commission is expected to advise gradually phasing the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq from combat to training and supporting Iraqi units, with a goal of pulling back American combat troops by early 2008. It is also expected to urge a more energetic effort to involve Iraq's neighbors in ending violence there, including Iran and Syria, which the U.S. considers pariah states.

However, Bush must feel under some pressure as his new Secretary of Defence has just said that he does not think the US is winning the Iraq war despite Bush's comment on Oct. 25 when he stated, "Absolutely, we're winning.''

This level of blind optimism is what Bush uses as a substitute for an actual plan. It has proven, so far, to be disastrous and there is no indication that Bush intends to dramatically change course.

In a brief phone interview, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said the president "made it clear he intends to be successful in Iraq and he's not going to be in the business of effecting some scheduled withdrawal.''

Reading "State of Denial" I was struck by how often Bush would end meetings and discussions on Iraq by promising Victory without ever specifying how this Victory would be achieved. It's almost as if it something that can be achieved by willpower alone. As if the lessons of Vietnam were that the US lacked the stomach to see the fight through, rather than the fact they simply lost a Guerilla war.

I am convinced that this is the mindset of Cheney and, from the noises emanating from Bush's own camp, it may well be the President's mindset as well.

All indications are that Bush is stubborn enough to ignore the Baker recommendations. This would be folly.

Some lawmakers have warned against the hype surrounding the Baker commission, echoing administration remarks that it will be one of several assessments done.

"They should not become a substitute for the call of the commander in chief,'' Hunter said.

I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that the Baker study should become a substitute for the call of the Commander in Chief, but - when things are going as disastrously as they are - any Commander in Chief worth his salt should listen very carefully to what Baker has to say.

Where I see a possible area of dispute lies in the different aspirations that both camps possess.

Baker - possibly working along the lines of Bush I - is seeking to extradite the US from a foreign policy debacle. Bush is seeking to avoid acknowledging defeat.

There is a wide chasm between both those viewpoints. One concerns itself with the good of the nation as a whole, the other with the political legacy of one man. And that one man is determined not to admit that he got it wrong.

It's going to be an interesting couple of weeks.

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tag: Bush, Iraq war, "Stay the course", James T Baker

Robert Fisk: Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial

By Robert Fisk

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq "until the job is complete"? The "job" - Washington's project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel's image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

History's "deniers" are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be kind. George W Bush - or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter - need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.

In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah's Iran as "an island of stability in the region" only days before Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution brought down his regime. President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters.

And was it not Saddam Hussein who promised the "mother of all battles" for Kuwait before the great Iraqi retreat in 1991? And was it not Saddam again who predicted a US defeat in the sands of Iraq in 2003? Saddam's loyal acolyte, Mohamed el-Sahaf, would fantasise about the number of American soldiers who would die in the desert; George W Bush let it be known that he sometimes slipped out of White House staff meetings to watch Sahaf's preposterous performance and laugh at the fantasies of Iraq's minister of information.

So who is laughing at Bush now? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, almost as loyal a retainer to Bush as Sahaf was to Saddam, receives the same false praise from the American president that Nasser and Brezhnev once lavished upon their generals. "I appreciate the courage you show during these difficult times as you lead your country," Bush tells Maliki. "He's the right guy for Iraq," he tells us. And the Iraqi Prime Minister who hides in the US-fortified "Green Zone" - was ever a crusader fortress so aptly named? - announces that "there is no problem". Power must be more quickly transferred to Maliki, we were informed yesterday. Why? Because that will save Iraq? Or because this will allow America to claim, as it did when it decided to allow the South Vietnamese army to fight on its own against Hanoi, that Washington is not to blame for the debacle that follows? "One of his frustrations with me is that he believes that we've been slow about giving him the tools necessary to protect the Iraqi people." Or so Bush says. "He doesn't have the capacity to respond. So we want to accelerate that capacity." But how can Maliki have any "capacity" at all when he rules only a few square miles of central Baghdad and a clutch of rotting ex-Baathist palaces?
About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush's remark that "there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all." Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power. The withdrawal of Shia ministers from Maliki's cabinet mirror the withdrawal of Shia ministers from another American-supported administration in Beirut - where the Lebanese fear an equally appalling conflict over which Washington has, in reality, no military or political control.

Bush even appeared oblivious of the current sectarian map of Iraq. "The Prime Minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition of Iraq would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence," he said. "I agree." But Iraq is already "split into parts". The fracture of Iraq is virtually complete, its chasms sucking in corpses at the rate of up to a thousand a day.

Even Hitler must chuckle at this bloodbath, he who claimed in April 1945 that Germany would still win the Second World War, boasting that his enemy, Roosevelt, had died - much as Bush boasted of Zarqawi's killing - while demanding to know when General Wenck's mythical army would rescue the people of Berlin. How many "Wencks" are going to be summoned from the 82nd Airborne or the Marine Corps to save Bush from Iraq in the coming weeks? No, Bush is not Hitler. Like Blair, he once thought he was Winston Churchill, a man who never - ever - lied to his people about Britain's defeats in war. But fantasy knows no bounds.

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tag: Bush, Iraq war, "Stay the course", war on terror

Two Wrongs

New video from the Dems.



tag: mid-term, elections, November, Dick, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld must go, "Stay the course", chemical weapons, Republican, Democrat

Papers sold to military: ‘Rumsfeld must go’

Just days after President Bush publicly gave his strong support for his Secretary of Defence, a family of publications that cater to the military are calling for Rumsfeld to go.

The editorial, released to NBC News on Friday ahead of its Monday publication date, stated, "It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

The editorial will appear just one day before the midterm election, in which GOP candidates have been losing ground, according to recent polls.

"This is not about the midterm elections," continued the editorial, which will appear in the Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, and Marine Corps Times on Monday. "Regardless of which party wins Nov. 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go."

On Wednesday, Bush said in an interview that he wanted both the Vice President and the Secretary of Defence to stay until the end of his administration.

As Christopher Hitchens said in an extraordinary interview (which you can view here) firing people has never been Bush's strong point. He seems to be unable to see when someone has failed in their allotted task.

As Andrew Sullivan says in the same interview, "Here's a President who said that Michael Brown was doing 'a heck of a job' with Katrina. And now he's a President saying that Donald Rumsfeld has done a fantastic job in Iraq. It's the same denial. If you believe Michael Brown did a 'heck of a job' with Katrina, then you maybe believe Donald Rumsfeld has done a great job in Iraq. It's unhinged. In my view it suggests this man has lost his mind. No-one, objectively, can look at the way this war was conducted - whether you were for it as I was, or against it - and see that it's been done well. It's a disaster."

These are people who could normally be expected to carry the administration's Lie du Jour and run with it. It is becoming obvious that, when it comes to Iraq, the lie is simply becoming unsustainable.

There has been much effort made by some of Bush's supporters to try and place the blame for the debacle on to the shoulders of the generals on the ground. However, given the fact that Rumsfeld is known to have micro-managed the armed forces to the point of obsession, this is a charge that really isn't going to stick.

Now, just as Blair is facing across the Atlantic, the armed forces themselves are coming into open dispute with the administration.

The essential arrogance that has driven the Bush administration has demanded that the word of the Commander in Chief is sacrosanct and, as Bush is "The Decider", what he says goes. Everyone else is reduced to mere pawns to be moved across the board at the executives will.

All great military commanders know that this, whilst perhaps true on paper is - in actuality - a fantasy. Leaders lead and their leadership should possess qualities that naturally mean others wish, almost instinctively, to follow them.

For a group of people so in love with war and all things militaristic, the Bush administration is woefully short of people with any actual military experience. Perhaps it was this lack of any actual experience with the military that led Bush and his cohorts to believe that they could lead grown men like lemmings off a cliff.

Indeed, in the run up to this war I was struck by the fact that people with actual military experience, like Powell, opposed the war whilst the Chickenhawks were it's loudest proponents.

Bush may have donned the fighters pilot's suit for a photo-op, but that does not make him a fighter.

Arrogance and hubris have led Bush, Rumsfeld and the gang to this precipice. Now the people that they "lead" are calling for Rumsfeld's head.

If Bush has any sense, he should give it to them.

Click title for source.

UPDATE:

Billmon has covered the same story and, as always, is worth reading. A Taster:

Long ago, I worked for the company that owns the military Times publications, although my own paper was aimed at the civilian side of the government (we called our small corner of the newsroom "the demilitarized zone.") Maybe things have changed in 20 years but I can assure you that back then the Times papers were even more mindlessly pro-military than the Pentagon itself (which is kind of like being more Catholic than the pope, but with superior firepower). If they're taking aim at the SecDef -- and timing their battery fire for maximum political effect -- it's reasonable to believe that the generals have reached a point that in many countries would be followed in short order by a military coup.

Read the rest here.

tag: Rumsfeld, Bush, Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, Rumsfeld must go, open revolt,

State of Denial: Bob Woodward on Meet The Press

Bob Woodward describes Cheney cursing him as talking, "Bullshit" and hanging up on him.

As Woodward rightly states, this is the perfect metaphor for this entire administration. Hang up whenever you hear something that you don't want to hear. The most arrogant administration in my lifetime would not have crashed so badly if they had not refused to ever listen to dissenting voices. By equating agreeing with them with patriotism, they sealed their own fate.



tag: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial, Dick, Cheney, Iraq war, war on terror, casualties, rising

60min interview with Bob Woodward

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial,

Bob Woodward's New Book Highly Critical of Bush Failures

Tags: Countdown, Keith, Olbermann, Bob Woodward, President, Bush, State Of Denial, Iraq, War,

The Case against Condi is growing.

The case against Condi Rice is growing.

The Washington Post have released the latest excerpt from Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" entitled: "Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice".

It tells of how the CIA became so concerned about the mass of "communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States" that Tenet and J. Cofer Black decided call the national security adviser from the car and to demand an immediate meeting with Rice in the hope that this dramatic request - Black called it an "out of cycle" session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice - would get Rice's attention.

The reports of an imminent attack were so hard to ignore that:

Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming.

He did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one."

Tenet had been having difficulty in getting any movement on an immediate bin Laden action plan largely because Donald Rumsfeld had put forward the notion that all this noise on the intelligence networks could be a grand deception on bin Laden's part to test US reactions and suss their defences.

With this in mind:

Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined "Bin Laden Threats Are Real."

Having established that the threats were real, Tenet and Black approached Condi laying out their fears that an al Qaeda attack was imminent.

He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden.

The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain "voodoo" but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.

Besides, Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. "Adults should not have a system like this," he said later.

It seems impossible to reconcile reports like this with Rice's claim - indeed, the claims from the entire Bush administration - that 9-11 came as a bolt from the blue that no-one could possibly have seen coming.

What we have here is the CIA Director and his counterterrorism chief making a highly unusual appointment with Rice in the hope that their "out of the norm" behaviour will startle her out of her complacency and result in some kind of action to thwart a possible attack. What they received was what one always gets from Condi - an over promoted loyalist who's greatest gift is her ability to continue to mouth Republican party "talking points" no matter what pressure she is under - a regurgitation of the need for Star Wars that ignored the entire context of what Tenet and Black were trying to convey to her.

It is now obvious why the Bush administration could identify bin Laden as the culprit the day after 9-11, a point that has previously confused me. They could identify him so quickly because they had been so forcefully warned about what he intended to do.

The line that the administration has so far successfully managed to maintain is that no-one could have seen this coming. That is now exposed as a lie.

They were forcefully warned about what was about to happen, but lacked the wherewithal to grasp what they were being told.

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA.

Black later said, "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

The Bush administration will now move into full defence mode and repeat ad nauseam their claims that no-one could have predicted this, as if repetition somehow enhances their argument.

If Woodward's sources are correct then Rice and Rumsfeld should be forced to reconsider their positions. And, if they won't, then Bush should fire them.

The argument that they couldn't have possibly seen this coming no longer holds water.

Tags: Rice, Woodward, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Black, al Qaeda, CIA, State of Denial, bin Laden, 9-11, attacks, prediction, warnings,

Bombshell Book: Has Bush Lost Control Of Iraq?

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial,

White House Disputes Book's Report of Anti-Rumsfeld Moves

I said yesterday that I fully expected the Republican attack dogs to be set on Bob Woodward ahead of the publication of his new book which alleges that Bush ignored warnings over the need to send more troops to Iraq.

The White House now seem to have adopted a strategy of dismissing key parts of the book and dismissing the rest of it as somehow being "old news". It's similar to the way Snow wishes to deal with Clinton's allegations regarding bin Laden. They simply choose "not to engage".

"In a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy -- it kind of melts on contact," White House spokesman Tony Snow said at a briefing dominated by the topic. "We've read this book before. This tends to repeat what we've seen in a number of other books that have been out this year where people are ventilating old disputes over troop levels." Snow said it was well known that events in Iraq have been difficult and that officials have debated the right approach. "Rather than a state of denial," he said, "it's a state of the obvious."

"State of the obvious". It's a good line, but it doesn't go anywhere near addressing the points raised in Woodward's tome.

One of the most incendiary is the sheer amount of people who wanted Bush to remove Donald Rumsfeld from his post; Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice and even Laura Bush all thought Rummy should go.

The book reports that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. twice suggested that Bush fire Rumsfeld and replace him with former secretary of state James A. Baker III, first after the November 2004 election and again around Thanksgiving 2005. Card had the support of then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, as well as national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and senior White House adviser Michael J. Gerson, according to the book.

Even first lady Laura Bush reportedly told Card that she agreed Rumsfeld had become a liability for her husband, although she noted that the president did not agree. "I don't know why he's not upset with this," she told Card, according to the book. But Vice President Cheney and senior Bush adviser Karl Rove argued against dumping Rumsfeld, and Bush agreed.

Apparently the reason given by Cheney and Rove was that the President might be criticised as the removal of Rumsfeld might imply that the war in Iraq was being fought in the wrong way.

Now, in my naivete, I would have thought that the decision on whether or not the Secretary of Defence should or should not be removed would have something to do with the good of the troops on the ground; it seems extraordinary to me that the decision is made with no consideration of the troops, but rather a lot of consideration on whether or not such a decision would embarrass the President.

It seems "the Decider" decides such important matters based solely on how it reflects on himself.

The other astonishing thing the book reveals is the staggering level of complacency exhibited by Condaleeza Rice.

The book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they thought, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

It is also noteworthy that Rice has never given any details of these supposedly "aggressive" actions and that when she has given concrete examples in the past, they have turned out to be blatant lies.

It is also rather odd that this July 10 meeting is missing from the timeline reported by the 9-11 Commission. Is it because this meeting would shed bad light on to the administration? This certainly appears to be the impression held by J. Cofer Black.

Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.

And it's a sad day when your best defence is "You've never mentioned this before!" which appears to be the tack Sean McCormack is taking regarding Tenet and Black's criticisms.

However, the overall impression of a White House in denial certainly corresponds to every public utterance Bush has made on the subject of Iraq. For the last three years it has been almost impossible to reconcile Bush's Iraq with any of the facts emanating from the ground.

"The president himself is out of touch with reality, is in denial as to what is happening in Iraq," Pelosi said. "That could be the only explanation for why he has withheld the truth to the American people."

I think Nancy is being overly generous in that reading. There are many other reasons for why the President could be withholding the truth. Not least of which is the competence of his entire administration.

The book is released next week.

Click title for full article.

Tags: State of denial, Snow, Rice, Rumsfled, Woodward, Bush, Iraq, war on terror

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:

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.

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.

We can expect the Republican attack dogs to be set on Woodward any day now.

Tags: Bob, Woodward, State of Denial, Iraq, war, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, WMD