Bush loses Bob Woodward
New York Times - 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.”
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.