Bob Woodward’s revelations on 60 Minutes have identified two key scandals stemming from the White House’s pre-war planning: Bush’s talks with Saudi Arabia and the transferring of $700 million from the war in Afghanistan to Iraq. This post will only deal with the prior.
Aside from the bizarre White House decision to share classified military plans with the ambassador from a country with possible terrorist ties, the real scandal seems to surround what kind of secret deal Bush and Prince Bandar struck over oil prices.
Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election — to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.
Woodward says that Bandar understood that economic conditions were key before a presidential election: “They’re [oil prices] high. And they could go down very quickly. That’s the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer, or as we get closer to the election, they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.”
There’s obviously some information here we don’t know. For example, if Bandar pledged to “help” Bush with this offer, what was Bush’s response? If Bush did strike a deal with Saudi Arabia, what did he promise in return?
And here’s the stunning part of yesterday’s media inquiries: the White House hasn’t figured out how to respond to this yet.
When reporters asked about the $700 million transfer, White House officials were quick to respond with an explanation about flexibility Congress gave the administration in war planning. But when asked to respond to the Bush-Bandar deal that Woodward pointed out, these same officials grew suddenly reticent.
Naturally, this only makes the controversy look more appealing.
As Josh Marshall noted in reviewing the transcript from yesterday’s press gaggle, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was offered multiple opportunities to deny the Woodward account of a secret deal, but McClellan would not.
All McClellan would say is that he wasn’t prepared to “speak for Prince Bandar.” When asked, point blank, about whether a deal was struck, McClellan said, “I wouldn’t speculate one way or the other.”
That is more-than-a-little surprising. This is a serious scandal and a stunning accusation. McClelland doesn’t want to “speculate one way or the other”? If the charge is false, it would call for an emphatic denial. In fact, it’d be pretty easy for McClellan to categorically reject it. But he didn’t.
And finally, for inexplicable reasons, Woodward personally is trying to slowly back away from the very scandal his own book generated.
“I don’t say there’s a secret deal or any collaboration on this,” Woodward told CNN’s “Larry King Live” Monday. “What I say in the book is that the Saudis … hoped to keep oil prices low during the period before the election, because of its impact on the economy. That’s what I say.”
Right. All Woodward explained is that the Saudi ambassador met in private with the president at the White House and “pledged” to help Bush right before the election by manipulating the U.S. economy with lower gas prices. Why would anyone think that pointed to a secret deal?