Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Iraq book piles pressure on Bush


Woodward interviewed Mr Bush and administration officials for his book

US President George W Bush began secret planning for the war in Iraq in December 2001, a new book claims.
That was a time when the US was saying it was still pursuing a diplomatic solution to the standoff with Baghdad.

The book, titled "Plan of Attack", was written by Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington Post reporter.

Due out next week, it is likely to give fuel to critics who have accused the president of being too eager to go to war with Saddam Hussein.

The new claims about the Iraq war are being published in the US in a storm of publicity.

The Washington Post has published advance excerpts of Mr Woodward's behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months leading to the Iraq invasion.

Secret plans

Mr Woodward - known for his role in the Watergate scandal that forced president Richard Nixon to quit in 1974, interviewed Mr Bush and his administration officials for the book.

The president reportedly told Mr Woodward he would co-operate because he wanted the story of how the US had gone to war in Iraq to be told.

The journalist says Mr Bush met repeatedly with his war cabinet in late 2001 - three months after the 11 September attacks on the US - to plan the US attack on Iraq.

According to AP news agency, which obtained a copy of the book, he did not brief everyone on his national security team.

His national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was not fully briefed, AP quoted the book as saying.

Mr Bush told the journalist that if the news had leaked, it would have caused "enormous international angst and domestic speculation".

The book puts the blame for mistaken intelligence on weapons of mass destruction on the CIA director George Tenet, who reportedly assured the president the weapons existed.

Mr Woodward also says Vice-President Cheney was a "steamrolling force" behind war preparations and that the relationship between Mr Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell became severely strained.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3635129.stm

Here is an excerpt from the book Plan of Attack

PLAN OF ATTACK : Making the Case
With CIA Push, Movement to War Accelerated
Agency's Estimate of Saddam Hussein's Arsenal Became the White House's Rationale for Invasion
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 19, 2004; Page A01

(http://images.amazon.com/images/P/074325547X.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg)

This is the second of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq.

On Jan. 2, 2002, CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Vice President Cheney -- at Cheney's request -- to brief him on what the agency could do in Iraq.

In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Iraq was much less of a priority than terrorism for Tenet, but not for one of the agency officials who accompanied him to the meeting, the chief of the Iraqi Operations Group, a former covert operations officer who can be identified only by his nickname, Saul.

Within the CIA's Near East Division, which handled some of the hardest, most violent countries, the Iraqi Operations Group was referred to as "The House of Broken Toys." It was largely populated with new, green officers and problem officers, or old boys waiting for retirement. After taking it over in August 2001, Saul had begun a full review of where the CIA stood with Iraq.

At 43, Saul had worked for years in sensitive undercover posts as a case officer and senior operator in CIA stations around the world. Saul was born in a small town in Cuba; his father had been involved in one of the most spectacular CIA failures -- the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco in which 1,200 Cuban exiles had been abandoned on the beach by their CIA sponsors. As Saul told associates, "I am here as the result of a failed CIA covert operation."

Now Saul had a blunt message for Cheney about covert operations and Saddam Hussein. He told Cheney that covert action would not remove Hussein. The CIA would not be the solution.

The one thing the dictator's regime was organized for was to stop a coup, he said. Hussein had taken power in a coup. He has put down coups. The son of a bitch knows what a coup is, Saul said. If you are an Iraqi military unit and you have the bullets to launch a coup, you don't have the gas to move your tanks. If you have gas, you don't have bullets. Nobody stays in power long enough to launch a coup.

Only a U.S. military operation and invasion that the CIA could support had a chance of ousting Hussein, Saul told Cheney. The agency had done a lessons-learned study of past Iraq covert operations, he said, and frankly the CIA was tainted.

"We've got a serious credibility problem," he said. The Kurds, the Shiites, former Iraqi military officers and probably most attuned people in Iraq knew the history of the CIA's cutting and running. To reestablish credibility, potential anti-Hussein forces would have to see a determined seriousness on the part of the United States. Preparations for a massive military invasion might send that signal, nothing else.

Saul laid out for Cheney the problems with standing up at the United Nations, talking negotiations and containment, while secretly telling the Saudis and Jordanians the United States was going to remove the regime covertly. They needed a single national policy that everyone supported and explained in the same way.

Another lesson was that the CIA couldn't sustain a covert action program for a lengthy period of time. The regime would find some of the human sources that the agency might recruit and roll them up. So they had to move fast.

Cheney was used to briefers coming to his office with ambitious declarations and promises that their department or agency would deliver. The CIA message, which Saul later delivered to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was the opposite, sobering, highly unusual in its judgment that it really could not do the job.

Saul was discovering that the CIA reporting sources inside Iraq were pretty thin.

What was thin?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22552-2004Apr18.html

a battle for heaping blame on one faction while the whole of the beast gets off.