Card Urged Bush to Replace Rumsfeld, Woodward Says

[markalot]

Card Urged Bush to Replace Rumsfeld, Woodward Says


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092900368.html

By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 29, 2006; 12:24 PM

Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card on two occasions tried and failed to persuade President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, according to a new book by Bob Woodward that depicts senior officials of the Bush administration as unable to face the consequences of their policy in Iraq.

Card made his first attempt after Bush was reelected in November, 2004, arguing that the administration needed a fresh start and recommending that Bush replace Rumsfeld with former secretary of state James A. Baker III. Woodward writes that Bush considered the move, but was persuaded by Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, that it would be seen as an expression of doubt about the course of the war and would expose Bush himself to criticism.

Card tried again around Thanksgiving, 2005, this time with the support of First Lady Laura Bush, who according to Woodward, felt that Rumsfeld's overbearing manner was damaging to her husband. Bush refused for a second time, and Card left the administration last March, convinced that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam and that history would record that no senior administration officials had raised their voices in opposition to the conduct of the war.

The book is the third that Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, has written on the Bush administration since the terrorist attacks of September, 11, 2001. The first two were attacked by critics of the Bush administration as depicting the president in a heroic light. But the new book's title, "State of Denial," conveys the different picture that Woodward paints of the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. Excerpts of the book will be published in the Sunday and Monday editions of The Post.

Woodward writes that there was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon had known about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. In memos, reports and internal debates administration officials have voiced their concern about the conduct of the war, even while Bush and cabinet members such as Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have insisted that the war was going well.

Last May, Woodward writes, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence estimate predicting that violence will not only continue for the rest of this year in Iraq but increase in 2007.

"Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year," said the report, which was distributed to the White House, State Department and other intelligence agencies.

The report presented a similarly bleak assessment of oil production, electricity generation and the political situation in Iraq.

"Threats of Shia ascendancy could harden and expand Shia militant opposition and increase calls for coalition withdrawal," the report said.

Woodward writes that Rice and Rumsfeld have been warned repeatedly about the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Returning from his assignment as the first head of the Iraq Postwar Planning Office, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner told Rumsfeld on June 23, 2003, that the United States had made "three tragic mistakes" in Iraq.

The first two, he said, were the orders his successor, L. Paul Jerry Bremer, had given banning members of the Baath Party from government jobs and disbanding the Iraqi military. The third was Bremer's dismissal of an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term.

"There's still time to rectify this," he said. "There's still time to turn it around."

But Rumsfeld dismissed the idea, according to Woodward. "We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said.

A year later, Rumsfeld received an even more blunt criticism from Steve Herbits, a longtime friend who according to Woodward has served as an informal adviser to Rumsfeld since he became defense secretary. In a seven-page memo in July, 2005, entitled, "Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems," Herbits listed a series of questions for Rumsfeld:

* "Who made the decision and why didn't we reconstitute the Iraqi Army?"

* "Did no one realize we were going to need Iraqi security forces?"

* "Did no one anticipate the importance of stabilization and how best to achieve it?"

* "Why was the de-Baathification so wide and deep?"

He then described "Rumsfeld's style of operation," which he said was the "Haldeman model, arrogant," referring to Nixon's White House chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman. "Indecisive, contrary to popular image. Would not accept that some people in some areas were smarter than he. . . . Trusts very few people. Very, very cautious. Rubber glove syndrome---a tendency not to leave his fingerprints on decisions."

Woodward does not say how Rumsfeld responded.

Some of the highest-ranking officers serving under Rumsfeld had similar misgivings about Iraq.

Last March, Gen. John Abizaid, head of the Central Command, met privately with Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who had criticized the Bush administration for its approach to Iraq as "a flawed policy wrapped in illusion" and called for withdrawal. Murtha was then attacked by the White House for "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

According to Murtha, Woodward writes, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis and held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."

But, according to Woodward, Rumsfeld made sure that the two men who he has chosen to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace -- were not people who would directly challenge him.

Woodward writes that just before Pace was named chairman he was visited by an old friend, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, the NATO commander. Jones expressed chagrin that Pace would even want to be chairman. "You're going to face a debacle and be part of the debacle in Iraq," he said. U.S. prestige was at a 50- or 75-year low in the world. He said he was so worried about Iraq and the way Rumsfeld ran things that he wondered if he himself should not resign in protest.

And, he told his friend, according to Woodward: "You should not be the parrot on the secretary's shoulder."

Woodward writes that he called Jones at NATO headquarters in Belgium and Jones confirmed the story.

Woodward describes Rice as frequently at odds with Rumsfeld when she served as national security adviser and her staff as increasingly concerned about the lack of a strategy for winning the war in Iraq.

When she became secretary of state in 2005, Rice asked Philip Zelikow, an old friend, to travel to Iraq to assess the situation. On February 10, Rice's 14th day as secretary, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced memo.

"At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.

"State of Denial" adds new information about Rice's role in the Bush administration's efforts to combat terrorism in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks. That subject became a source of controversy this week after former President Bill Clinton accused "President Bush's neocons" and other Republicans of ignoring Osama bin Laden until the attacks, and Rice responded angrily to the charge.

Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, then-CIA director George Tenet became so concerned about the communication intelligence agencies were receiving indicating that a terrorist attack was imminent that he went to the White House with counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black -- without an appointment -- to meet with Rice, then the national security adviser. He and Black hoped the meeting would alert Rice to the urgency they felt.

But Tenet and Black felt that Rice gave them "the brush-off," according to Woodward, telling them that a plan for coherent action against bin Laden was already in the works. Woodward writes that both Tenet and Black felt the meeting was the starkest warning the White House was given about bin Laden.

Woodward writes that former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger has played a key role as an outside adviser to Bush on the Iraq war. Kissinger, according to Woodward, sees the Iraq war through the prism of his own experience in the Nixon administration during Vietnam, and has counseled Bush to "stick it out" and not even entertain the idea of withdrawing troops.

At one point, to emphasize his position, he gave Michael Gerson, then a White House speech writer, a copy of a memo he wrote to Nixon in September, 1969. "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," Kissinger wrote.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[akip]

i can't wait to read this book. it's consistent with everything i've read so far, but just adds more fuel to the flames, haha.

[markalot]

Well there is another scary part that's kind of brushed over in this article. Kissenger is trying to win the Vietnam war again.

That tells me that Bush is now convinced this is like Vietnam. He or his group hasn't learned anything from the past and we repeated it. So Card thinks this is like Vietnam and Bush, as if to give credit to that theory, is being advised by Kissenger who thinks the only reason we lost Vietnam was because we lost our nerve.

Iraq = Vietnam. How can anyone possibly deny it now.

[markalot]

The actual scoop was from the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html?hp&ex=1159588800&en=3862efd9e06a71e9&ei=5094&partner=homepage


September 29, 2006
Book Says Bush Ignored Urgent Warning on Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.

The warning is described in “State of Denial,” scheduled for publication on Monday by Simon & Schuster. 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.

The book, bought by a reporter for The New York Times at retail price in advance of its official release, is the third that Mr. Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq. Like Mr. Woodward’s previous works, the book includes lengthy verbatim quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources for the information.

Mr. Woodward writes that his book is based on “interviews with President Bush’s national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.” Some of those interviewed, including Mr. Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Mr. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.

Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.

It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.

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.

Two members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle, Mr. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Mr. Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Mr. Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was “time to put your war uniform on,” a reference to his many years in the Army.

Mr. Tenet, the man who once told Mr. Bush that it was a “slam-dunk” that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Mr. Bush, according to Mr. Woodward’s account.

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. 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.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

But it was General Garner who was soon removed, in favor of Mr. Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi army and removing Baathists from office were eventually disparaged within the government.

The book suggests that senior intelligence officials were caught off guard in the opening days of the war when Iraqi civilian fighters engaged in suicide attacks against armored American forces, the first hint of the deadly insurgent attacks to come.

In a meeting with Mr. Tenet of the Central Intelligence Agency, several Pentagon officials talked about the attacks, the book says. It says that Mr. Tenet acknowledged that he did not know what to make of them.

Mr. Rumsfeld reached into political matters at the periphery of his responsibilities, according to the book. At one point, Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio, where the Abrams battle tank was manufactured. Mr. Rumsfeld phoned Mr. Card to complain that Mr. Bush should not have made the visit because Mr. Rumsfeld thought the heavy tank was incompatible with his vision of a light and fast military of the future. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Card believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was “out of control.”

...

[markalot]

...

The fruitless search for unconventional weapons caused tension between Vice President Cheney’s office, the C.I.A. and officials in Iraq. Mr. Woodward wrote that Mr. Kay, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, e-mailed top C.I.A. officials directly in the summer of 2003 with his most important early findings.

At one point, when Mr. Kay warned that it was possible the Iraqis might have had the capability to make such weapons but did not actually produce them, waiting instead until they were needed, the book says he was told by John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director: “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting. Be very careful. We can’t let this out until we’re sure.”

Mr. Cheney was involved in the details of the hunt for illicit weapons, the book says. One night, Mr. Woodward wrote, Mr. Kay was awakened at 3 a.m. by an aide who told him Mr. Cheney’s office was on the phone. It says Mr. Kay was told that Mr. Cheney wanted to make sure he had read a highly classified communications intercept picked up from Syria indicating a possible location for chemical weapons.

Mr. Woodward and a colleague, Carl Bernstein, led The Post’s reporting during Watergate, and Mr. Woodward has since written a string of best sellers about Washington. More recently, the identity of Mr. Woodward’s Watergate source known as Deep Throat was disclosed as having been W. Mark Felt, a senior F.B.I. official.

In late 2005, Mr. Woodward was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case. He also apologized to The Post’s executive editor for concealing for more than two years that he had been drawn into the scandal.

Mark Mazzetti and David Johnston contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[slopechz]

Well there is another scary part that's kind of brushed over in this article. Kissenger is trying to win the Vietnam war again.

That tells me that Bush is now convinced this is like Vietnam. He or his group hasn't learned anything from the past and we repeated it. So Card thinks this is like Vietnam and Bush, as if to give credit to that theory, is being advised by Kissenger who thinks the only reason we lost Vietnam was because we lost our nerve.

Iraq = Vietnam. How can anyone possibly deny it now.
I saw this on Keith Olbermann last and nearly fell out of my chair.

[markalot]

Democrats seize on Woodward book
Senate leaders call for Bush to change course in Iraq, fire Rumsfeld
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC

Updated: 7:37 p.m. ET Sept 29, 2006

Democrats leaped on disclosures in a new book critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq and called Friday for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to be fired, but the White House responded by dismissing the book as inaccurate “cotton candy.”

The book, “State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III,” by Bob Woodward, depicts the Bush administration as being deeply divided over the war in Iraq. Some of its juiciest disclosures landed with a bang Friday in the capital, just five weeks before elections in which Democrats were already projected to make significant inroads in the Republican majorities in Congress.

Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post whose exhaustively researched examinations of power are instantaneous best-sellers, paints a bipolar administration. He writes that major players have taken sides in a struggle between an arrogant, out-of-touch Rumsfeld and internal skeptics, notably former Chief of Staff Andrew Card, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and many of Rumsfeld’s own military leaders.

Most seriously, the book discloses that Bush ignored pleas from a top adviser as far back as September 2003 for tens of thousands more troops to fight the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq.

But it also dishes a great deal of insider gossip, with no one coming off worse than Rumsfeld, who is criticized by numerous named senior government officials as isolated from the reality of the war on the ground and dismissive of any intelligence and advice contrary to his optimism.

In an interview with ABC News, Card confirmed Woodward’s report that he twice tried to have Rumsfeld fired and replaced with former Secretary of State James Baker — once with the support of Bush’s wife, Laura — only to be eased out of his own job. Asked about that report Friday, White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that “I’m not going to contradict” Card, although he said Laura Bush had denied her involvement.

The book is not being published until next week, but some news organizations, including The New York Times and the New York Daily News, were able to buy copies ahead of publication and reported numerous details Friday. Extensive excerpts will be published over the weekend by Newsweek and The Post, which published its own account of the book on its Web site Friday when details began emerging.

Democrats: We told you so
Democrats seized on the reported disclosures as confirming what they have been saying about Bush since before his re-election in 2004.

“I wasn’t surprised about anything,” Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said in interview with MSNBC-TV’s Tucker Carlson. “The president is locked in to make certain we don’t leave Iraq until victory, and yet he can’t describe victory.”

At a news conference in Washington, Senate Democrats called for Rumsfeld to resign or be fired, and for Bush to acknowledge his mistakes and overhaul his Iraq policy.

“We believe, many of us, that he has to go, and we are going to be renewing our efforts in a number of ways to urge the president to find a new secretary of defense,” said Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, a member of the Democratic leadership.

As for Bush, “He doesn’t want to see the facts,” said Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on Armed Services. “He doesn’t want to acknowledge reality. And if we’re going to change the course and change the dynamic in Iraq, we have to end this state of denial. We’ve got to bring some reality to the president and his administration.”

Official administration reaction was relatively muted. Bush did not address the reports during remarks at a political rally Thursday night in Alabama for Gov. Bob Riley, and Rumsfeld refused to comment on the book — for which he was interviewed extensively.

“First of all, I haven’t read it,” Rumsfeld told reporters Friday when asked about the book during a NATO meeting in Slovenia. “Second, I don’t know what you’re referring to. And third, you can find someone in government to say almost anything you want.”

Snow makes administration’s case
It was left to Snow to carry the attack against the book, which put the White House in an especially awkward position because it had so enthusiastically embraced Woodward’s first two books in his “Bush at War” series, which depicted the president as decisive, informed and in charge.

However, this book, said Snow — who acknowledged that he had not read it — was inaccurate. “You know, in a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy — it kind of melts on contact,” he said.

“A couple of weeks ago, the president was being accused of trying to scare people,” Snow said. “Now, all of a sudden, he’s accused of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Neither one is true.”

But Snow repeatedly refused to address specific incidents recounted in the book, reminding reporters that he had been on the job only a few months and could not speak about matters that took place before he arrived earlier this year.

For example, when pressed about the critical depiction of Rumsfeld, he said that he had been unable to reach the secretary for any reaction, even though Rumsfeld appeared before reporters earlier in the day in Slovenia.

Snow did take issue with two specific incidents, however.

Snow denied that the administration had ignored the memo calling for more troops in Iraq, which was written three years ago by Robert Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council.

In fact, it was Rumsfeld himself who personally took an interest in the memo, Snow said.

According to Snow, Rumsfeld met with Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and said of the memo: “This is a reasonable proposal from a reasonable person. Let’s look at it.”

Rice calls one report ‘ridiculous’
And Snow said he had been able to talk with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who denied one of Woodward’s tidbits.

Woodward reports that the split between Rumsfeld and Rice during her days as national security adviser was so deep that Bush had to intervene personally, ordering Rumsfeld to take Rice’s calls.

“Her comments were, ‘This is ridiculous, and I told that to Woodward,’” Snow quoted Rice as saying, adding that “the two of them have been having daily phone conversations throughout this administration.”

Snow quoted Rice as saying: “That’s not the way Don Rumsfeld operates. He’s not a guy who’s going to be copping an attitude about chains of command. He’s somebody who makes his point directly.”

Kissinger downplays his role
One of the more titillating disclosures in the book is that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney regularly consult with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who Woodward writes has advised Bush to “stick it out” and reject calls to withdraw U.S. troops.

In an interview Friday with NBC News, Kissinger minimized his influence and expressed wonderment that anyone would be taken aback that the administration would talk to former government officials with relevant experience.

Kissinger, one of more than two dozen members of the Pentagon’s civilian Defense Policy Board, told NBC News producer Robert Windrem that he and Bush rarely talk about short-term tactical matters, limiting their conversations to “usually conceptual questions of, where are we going? What is your judgment on this?”

“Why should it be surprising [when] I’m on the board in the Defense Department that deals with Defense Department matters that meets every four months?” Kissinger asked. “Why should that — why should that be surprising that the president asks my opinion?”

NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, Andrea Mitchell, Lester Kretman, Keith Strickland, Michael Viqueira and Robert Windrem and MSNBC-TV’s Tucker Carlson contributed to this report.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15063982/page/2/

[markalot]

So now they claim a Woodward book is inaccurate, and Card has confirmed one of the most damning pieces of evidence, that he wanted Rumsfeld out.

I think this is the turning point heading toward the election. Too many people trust Woodward and this book, and the release has been moved up to tomorrow, will be an instant best seller. Look out!

[markalot]

Henry you mean.

I disagree with you on Woodward.

[george]

Rumsfeld should be gone after the election. If the Republicans lose seats, they can spin it as a sign of their willingness to change. If the Republicans do well, he can quietly retire to the Eastern Shore.

[markalot]

The first excerpt is out. Too long to post here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000293.html

snippet:

In May, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."

Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.

Instead of a "long retreat," the report predicted a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."

A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. (In July the number would be over 4,500.) The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.

On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."

There was a vast difference between what the White House and the Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.

(The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists -- following a series of upbeat speeches by the president -- presented a similar contrast.)

[markalot]

And yet another in depth article, this time about Powell. There's a ton of good stuff in this one.

Falling on His Sword
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092700106.html

[akip]

what woodward does, invariably, is to get people in high places to talk and put down what they say. they talk to him 'cause they know everyone else is talking to him and they'd better get in their two cents. of course any investigative journalist will hear all the grinding axes, but many of those axes have legitimate frustrations. it's not news that there were/are many frustrated parties in this administration, particularly in the state dept.

so he's usually criticized--or praised---by whoever, left or right, thinks they came off best/worst and how that fits with their own agenda. i expect this book will be very much the same. what interests me, however, is how it does or doesn't square with the various credible books and articles i've already read. so far, it seems as if it's supporting what's been out there for some time, but he's filling in some juicy details.

[akip]

...which is why I think he's little more than a Washington gossip columnist. And has been for some time. At its essence, publishing private conversational tidbits between Laura Bush and George Bush is of little difference than publishing private conversational tidbits between Lindsay Lohan and whomever she's giving vd to this week. It's the same bit of journalism.

except, since they're talking about affairs of state and in how decisions are made at the top, it's much juicier for those of us who are rather more interested in war than in who lohan is fucking. ;)

[REMgirl]

But what Lindsay Lohan says means zero. What Bush says becomes national policy.

I wish I could be a fly on the wall in the Oval office sometime. I wish Colin Powell would finally be so fed up with the lies that HE would write a tell-all book. I would pay a fortune to read that book.

[akip]

I wish I could be a fly on the wall in the Oval office sometime. I wish Colin Powell would finally be so fed up with the lies that HE would write a tell-all book. I would pay a fortune to read that book.

powell's done his share of talking---he's supposed to have been a source for woodward in "plan of attack." but i doubt he'll ever do something that would be blantantly hurtful to the bush family, since he's been quite loyal to geo Hw.

[REMgirl]

Oh, I know he probably never would talk. But of all the people Bush has used up and dumped aside, Powell probably has the best dirt. He has too much class to write a nasty book, but maybe a tasteful tell all in a few years... ;)

[GoWest]

There's an updated story on msnbc today. Story here (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15098140/). There were a couple of things that I hadn't seen before that I though were interesting.

Cheney had suggested Rumsfeld to Bush in late December 2000. Rumsfeld was so impressive, Bush told Card at the time. He had had the job in the Ford administration a quarter-century before, and it was as if he were now saying, "I think I've got some things I'd like to finish."Another instance where Rumsfeld seems to be fighting the Vietnam war all over again.

But there was another dynamic that Bush and Card discussed. Rumsfeld and Bush's father, the former president, couldn't stand each other. Bush senior didn't trust Rumsfeld and thought he was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian. Rumsfeld had also made nasty private remarks that the elder Bush was a lightweight.

Card could see that overcoming the former president's skepticism about Rumsfeld added to the president-elect's excitement. It was a chance to prove his father wrong. And Rumsfeld fit Cheney's model of a defense secretary who could not only battle things out with the generals but who also had as much gravitas as the rest of the new national security team.Wow! To some extent, he hired Rumsfeld in order to prove to daddy that he could be his own man.



Card's relationship with Rumsfeld was always difficult. Last year, in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with devastating effect, Bush decided more troops were needed and asked Card to relay the message to Rumsfeld.

"You know I don't report to you," Rumsfeld said.

"I know you don't report to me," Card replied. "You report to the president. But believe me, he would like you to do this."

"I'm not going to do it unless the president tells me," Rumsfeld told the chief of staff. Too many strains and obligations were being placed on the National Guard.

Card protested that he had just talked to the president, who had made an absolute decision.

"Then he's going to have to tell me," Rumsfeld said.

"Hey," the president said to Card later. "Rumsfeld called me up. I thought you were going to handle that."Again, wow!. These are the kind of things you run into when the boss is weaker than the subordinates. The dominant personalities call the shots and no one - including the boss - can do anything about it.

[markalot]

Cool, that's the latest excerpt and a no rgistration required link.

To be fair Woodward says Bush made this comment to Card:

Bush would nominate Rumsfeld, he told Card. Cheney had been selected for his national security credentials. He was the expert, and this was the sort of decision that required expertise. Still, Bush wondered privately to Card about pitfalls, if there was something he didn't see here. After all, his father had strong feelings.

Is this a trapdoor? he asked.

I would say he has his answer.

[markalot]

The Leaders We Have

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/02/AR2006100200936.html

By George F. Will
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; A17

While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: "The vice president wants to know if you've looked at this area. We have indications -- and here are the geocoordinates -- that something's buried there." Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon.

This story from Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" would be hilarious were it not about war. The vignette is dismaying because it seems symptomatic of a blinkering monomania that may have prevented obsessed persons from facing facts.

Some will regard "State of Denial" as Katrina between hard covers, a snapshot of dysfunctional government. But it is largely just a glimpse of government , disheartening as that fact may be to those who regard government as a glistening scalpel for administering social transformation.

Once, when President William Howard Taft was listening to an aide talk about "the machinery of government," Taft murmured, "The young man really thinks it's a machine." Actually, government is people, and not a random slice of the population. Those at government's pinnacle generally are strong-willed, ambitious, competitive, opinionated and have agendas about which they care deeply. That is why they are there. And why almost any administration, carefully scrutinized, looks much like a teaspoon of pond water viewed under a microscope -- a teeming, disorderly maelstrom of sometimes rival life forms. That is especially true of an administration staffed with such canny Washington survivors as Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. A government of rookies or shrinking violets would be more harmonious. So, how much of a virtue is harmony?

"State of Denial" will take a toll on government collegiality and the candor of its deliberations. It is based on astonishing indiscretions -- current and past officials making private memos and conversations public for motives that cannot be pure.

The book is hardly a revelation about supposed hidden chaos in Washington that produced the obvious chaos in Iraq. It does demonstrate that President Bush and others were shockingly slow to recognize Iraq's complexities and downward spiral. But we already knew that.

The book does not demonstrate that the president is in a state of denial. His almost exclusive and increasingly grating reliance on the rhetoric of unwavering resolve may be mistaken. It certainly has undermined his reputation as a realist. But he believes a president must be "the calcium in the backbone" of the nation, so the resolute face that he thinks he must show the nation does not preclude private anguish.

The book's central figure, however, is not Bush, whose lack of inquisitiveness is a defect, but Rumsfeld, whose abrasive inquisitiveness is supposedly a defect. The prologue begins with Rumsfeld's selection as defense secretary. The 45th and final chapter contains much about Bush but revolves around an interview with Rumsfeld.

The book actually includes one heartening story that should enhance Rumsfeld's reputation. On Veterans Day 2005, the president traveled to a Pennsylvania Army depot to deliver a speech announcing the new military policy for Iraq, the policy of "clear, hold and build." Woodward says Rumsfeld, having read the speech, called Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, a half-hour before Bush was to deliver it, and said, "Take that out." Card replied that the three words were the centerpiece of the speech, not to mention the war strategy. Rumsfeld replied, "Clear, we're doing. It's up to the Iraqis to hold. And the State Department's got to work with somebody on the build."

At last, a division of labor that uses the U.S. military only for properly military purposes and assigns responsibilities in a way that will force Iraq's government to grow up. In the name of counterinsurgency, there has been too much of what today's military argot calls "full-spectrum operations" -- operations that go beyond killing insurgents to building schools, connecting sewers and other civil projects that keep the training wheels on the Iraqi government's bicycle and keep the United States chasing the chimera of "nation-building."

"Where's the leader?" Bush, according to Woodward, has exclaimed in dismay about the Iraqi government's dithering. "Where's George Washington? Where's Thomas Jefferson? Where's John Adams, for crying out loud?" For a president to ask that question about Iraq, that tribal stew, is enough to cause one to ask it about the United States.

georgewill@washpost.com

© 2006 The Washington Post Company