Right now, somewhere in the OEOB, someone is trying to figure out how to describe Bob Woodward as a disgruntled former employee.
After tarnishing his reputation a bit with his last fawning book, “Bush at War,” Woodward is back with “Plan of Attack,” a detailed account of the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. All indications are the White House isn’t going to care for this one very much.
It may seem like an eternity ago, but there was a time the Bush administration actually wanted the world to believe that the president preferred a diplomatic solution to our “problems” with Iraq. Of course, it was all a charade.
Beginning in late December, 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.
The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to “Plan of Attack” by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA’s conclusion Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet’s assurance to the president that it was a “slam dunk” case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
In three and a half hours of interviews with Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bush defended the secret planning and said war was his “absolute last option.” But “Plan of Attack” describes how the growing commitments required of the military, the CIA and U.S. allies as the planning intensified would have been difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration led by Vice President Cheney, who Woodward describes as a “powerful, steamrolling force” who had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a “fever” about removing Hussein by force.
In one sense, this isn’t entirely new information. We learned in January, for example, that just six days after 9/11, Bush directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. It’s impossible to seriously argue that the administration wasn’t determined to launch this invasion from the beginning and that the pretense of “diplomacy” was bogus.
But Woodward’s book not only will add detail and context, it may reignite interest in a scandal that should outrage the public.
After a while, I imagine, it’s hard for the White House to come up adequate spin to respond to these devastating books. Paul O’Neill was attacked, Richard Clarke was attacked, and I’m sure Bob Woodward will be attacked. But with so much support and evidence to bolster the case against Bush’s obvious lies, when will Bush’s lackeys find it impossible to defend the president with a straight face?
Woodward’s book also appears to reinforce everything Bush’s critics have suspected about internal strife that divided the White House against itself.
Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell — never close despite years of working together — that became so strained that Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessed with trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact.
Powell felt Cheney and his allies — his chief aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith and what Powell called Feith’s “Gestapo” office — had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a private dinner he hosted a year ago to celebrate the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and “always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.”
More importantly, military leaders who were focused on Afghanistan — the enemy that was responsible for the attacks of 9/11 — were less than pleased that Bush wanted to refocus attention elsewhere.
The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
The AP account of the Woodward book also notes that Bush was anxious for war, but was equally interested in maintaining secrecy.
Woodward says Bush pulled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld aside Nov. 21, 2001 — when U.S. forces and allies were in control of about half of Afghanistan — and asked him what kind of war plan he had on Iraq. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush told him to get started on a fresh one.
The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about it and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into the planning at some point, the president said not to do so yet.
Even Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.
In an interview two years later, Bush told Woodward that if the news had leaked, it would have caused “enormous international angst and domestic speculation.”
So Bush pursued his reckless war anyway and ended up with “enormous international angst and domestic speculation.”
Woodward’s book could shake the political landscape up even more that it already is. Stay tuned.