| Subject: Book: Plan of Attack |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 07:36:03 04/24/04 Sat
In reply to:
Tammie
's message, "The War" on 08:12:21 03/22/03 Sat
For the mess Bush has got us & the world into because of his personal desires, carelessness, & lies, not only shouldn't he be re-elected, he should be put on trial for high treason... a crime punishable by life in prison or death.
Plan of Attack, the story of how and why George W. Bush went to war against Iraq, contains many surprises, as Woodward's sources, most of them -- except the President -- not on the record, give their version of why Bush made his fateful decision to go to war, in the main hope of transforming the Middle East. This is the third recent book that documents the Bush administration's Iraq fetish: In The Price of Loyalty, former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that in the first months of the Bush presidency, Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden, was the target of the Cheney-Rumsfeld circle of neoconservatives; and in Richard Clarke's Against all Enemies, the former anti-terrorism chief revealed that in the first hours after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked him about Iraq's involvement, not al-Qaeda's. Woodward confirms these incidents and adds a bushel more.
Woodward verifies O'Neill's account that the Principals Committee, the body of senior officials concerned with national security, was consumed with Iraq, and not with bin Laden. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, argued in the summer of 2001 that it was necessary and relatively easy to get rid of Saddam. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a key source for Woodward's book, thought "this is lunacy." He went to the President and pleaded, "Don't let yourself get pushed into anything until you are ready. . . . You don't have to be bullied into this." "I've got it," the president replied, "I know it."
Woodward also supports Clarke's account that Iraq, not al-Qaeda, was the main focus of Bush's team even after Sept. 11: Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, was in the Pentagon on Sept. 11 and went through the harrowing near-death experience of having a plane hit his building and kill 184 people. Yet at 2:40 p.m., with dust and smoke filling the operations centre, Rumsfeld raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks. The next day, in the inner circle of Bush's war cabinet, Rumsfeld asked if the terrorist attacks did not present an "opportunity" to launch against Iraq.
Woodward's book is full of such gems. He reveals that as early as Nov. 21, 2001, President Bush asked his defence secretary to prepare a war plan for Iraq, but to keep it secret because a leak would raise "enormous international angst and domestic speculation." In December, 2002, after tough questioning by Bush, George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told the President that intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk," and Woodward, astonishingly, reveals that Bush had decided on war in January, 2003, months before a debate in the United Nations. The President told his closest aides that "time is not on our side here . . . we're going to have to go to war."
Bush made that decision after talking to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and even the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, before he got around to informing his secretary of state, Colin Powell. Months earlier, Powell had warned Bush that if he went to war, "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all." Powell's eerily prescient warnings were, of course, ignored, with the consequences that we see every night on the news.
For Canadians, our great debate over Iraq receives the attention our country usually receives in Washington: In a 443-page book, there is exactly one paragraph about Canada. An unnamed Canadian "counterpart" to Rice (almost certainly Claude Laverdure, then Jean Chrétien's foreign policy adviser, now Canada's ambassador to France) told Rice on March 20, 2003, "Sorry, we can't be part of this," but promised to keep the rhetoric at low boil, "just enough to satisfy Canadian public opinion but without being belligerent or provocative." Not exactly a profile in courage.
The overwhelming thesis of Plan of Attack is that Iraq was an obsession, an idée fixe of the Bush neoconservatives. They were determined to fix the leftover remains of Bush senior's Gulf War by deposing Saddam.
Colin Powell believed, according to Woodward, that for Vice-President Cheney, the secretary of defence under Bush senior, Iraq was a "fever" and that he misread and exaggerated intelligence about the Iraqi threat and alleged terrorist ties. "Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice-president. But there it was."
Plan of Attack is chilling. It reveals how a small group of men in powerful positions can mislead a people and take them to war. There was a good case for deposing Saddam Hussein, but the Bush administration never made it. Instead they fixated on weapons of mass destruction -- "a slam dunk" -- and fictitious ties to terrorism. The late historian Barbara Tuchman, in March to Folly, believed that humankind "makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity." Plan of Attack offers more than 400 pages in support of Tuchman's melancholy thesis.
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