The WaPo’s Bob Woodward’s last two books were, to put it mildly, disappointing. Woodward received tremendous access, including personal time with Bush and Cheney, led to texts which presented the president in the best possible light — competent, driven, and in charge.
The book that comes out on Monday, “State of Denial,” will apparently not be nearly as complementary.
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. […]
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. […]
[In September 2003,] 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…. The White House did nothing in response.
Kevin Drum’s summary captures the narrative nicely: “Powell didn’t get along with Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld didn’t get along with Rice, Cheney didn’t get along with anyone, the war was going to hell the entire time, and Bush was sleeping through the whole thing.”
The details, meanwhile, are sometimes startling.
In a scene reminiscent of LBJ and Vietnam, Dick 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.”
As Kay began to understand that Saddam’s regime didn’t actually produce WMD, John McLaughlin, the C.I.A.’s deputy director, told Kay, “Don’t tell anyone this. This could be upsetting.” Apparently, the Bush gang is a little touchy about reality permeating the bubble.
Better yet, the book also reports that the CIA’s top counterterrorism officials felt they could have killed Osama Bin Laden in the months before 9/11, but got the “brushoff” when they went to the Bush White House seeking the money and authorization.
CIA Director George Tenet and his counterterrorism head Cofer Black sought an urgent meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10, 2001, writes Bob Woodward in his new book “State of Denial.”
They went over top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack and “sounded the loudest warning” to the White House of a likely attack on the U.S. by Bin Laden.
Woodward writes that Rice was polite, but, “They felt the brushoff.”
Moreover, former White House chief of staff Andrew Card apparently tried, twice, to get Bush to fire Rumsfeld, and the president reportedly considered it — until Cheney and Rove talked Bush out of it. Forcing Rumsfeld out “would be seen as an expression of doubt about the course of the war and would expose Bush himself to criticism,” the Post noted today.
Some of this we’ve heard bits and pieces of before, some of it not, but the bottom line remains the same: the president and his team have been nothing short of deaf, dumb, and blind on practically every national security decision it’s confronted since taking office.