The Path To War: It's All Coming Clear...

If there has already been a post on this, I apologize, but this is huge. Woodward's Path To War is a direct recording of interviews with the people at the heart of the plan to go to war in Iraq, and directly correlated with interview recordings and transcripts of meetings, government documents and notes, etc.

Has anyone read this yet? I'm going to get it tomorrow, but saw him on the Daily Show, and if what he's saying is accurate, and if any journalist passes the sniff test, it's Woodward, then Wow. Not so much Wow on the contentions; it's just proof that much of what many of us who objected to the war already ackowledged...but WOW that Bush et al were so open about it.

Woodward says that he got so much one on one time with the notoriously secretive people involved partly because he had previously done a book about Bush which the WH felt was accurate and positive about the President, and additionally, they said to him that as he was going to write the book anyway, he might as well get his information first hand.

What's amazing is that, despite them being politicians, who Woodward says are always playing you, and even more despite being a group of politicians more secretive than most, a lot of incredibly damning stuff actually comes from the people themselves. Incredible.

Here are some highlights of the book as outlined in the interview.

* The war plan was never a progression of levels; it was a plan from Day One, and the process was simply find a plan to make it work, find the necessary information to sell it to the public and allies, and then get underway.

* That Cheney was "the steamroller", and Bush himself says that Cheney was in his office on an almost daily basis selling the need to go to war in Iraq from Day One. Woodward did not say that Cheney forced or convinced Bush, he said that Bush was also gung ho about Iraq coming into Office, but that they reinforced each other on a continuous basis.

* That Rice, Rumsfeld, and others were really not in the loop, and Rumsfeld himself admitted today on Hardball that he was upset that he wasn't at all part of the decision making process; that it was presented to him as fait accomplis. RIce, Rummy et al were merely told to sell it and get it underway.

* That Powell objected, virtually from the start. He said there were diplomatic alternatives which could better accomplish ur goals. He objected to the manner in which support for the war was being accumulated, and he most of all objected to Bush/Cheney's incredibly idealized versions of how the war/occupation would go down. He pointed out all the problems that we now see to be true: Assuming that the United States, a largely Christian superpower with a long history of exploiting the region and ignoring the plights of it's people will be seen as liberators and encounter little resistance once Saddam falls is not a viable post-invasion plan. But he was over-ruled, and eventually lost the war for the White House that was waged between Powell's State Dept. and Cheney's war plan, through the WH and Pentagon.

* That at a point SEVERAL MONTHS INTO the media campaign to convince Americans and the World about Saddam's WMD's, Nukes, etc., Bush and Tenet had a meeting where Bush asked Tenet to present the entire argument to him as though he were the American people, Tenet did, and Bush said " That's not gonna sell." Tenet told him not to worry, it was a slam dunk. The invasion came three months later.



Just found an article which paraphrases some of the book and much of what I am feeling:

Posted on Tue, Apr. 20, 2004


THE PRESIDENT
Woodward puts path of war in plain sight

BY RICHARD COHEN
cohenr@washpost.com.

Old joke: A man repeatedly rides a bike across the Mexican-U.S. border. Each time, he's stopped by Customs and the bike is taken apart. Nothing is found. Finally, one day a Customs official offers the man immunity from prosecution if he tells what he's smuggling. The man pauses, shrugs and says, ``Bicycles.''

I offer you this because I have just finished Bob Woodward's compelling new book, Plan of Attack, and while it contains several gasps per chapter -- more reasons why George Tenet should be fired, more proof that Condi Rice is in over her head and more reasons that Dick Cheney should be medicated -- the stunning disclosure that I expected is simply not there. I thought that Woodward would reveal the real reason that President Bush went to war in Iraq. It turns out we already know.

The ''bicycle'' in this case has been in plain sight: Bush's conviction that he is a servant of both God and history, chosen to liberate Iraq, bring democracy to the Middle East and make sure the United States is safe from terrorism. In the two lengthy on-the-record interviews that the president granted Woodward, Bush makes it abundantly clear that, somehow, this is all one package in his mind -- though to others Saddam Hussein posed no danger to America at all. Among other things, Hussein had no links to al Qaeda and apparently had no weapons of mass destruction.

But as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in an amazingly candid interview, Hussein's purported arsenal was not the prime reason for going to war. The real reason was the president's conviction that he was in an epochal fight against evil and had the historical opportunity to reorder the Middle East.

I confess that I have known and not known this. It has been apparent for some time, but a little hard to comprehend. Possibly, I and others thought, there was another reason -- like evening the score for Hussein's attempt to kill Bush's father. After all, the intent to go to war seemed to arise out of nowhere -- 72 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Where had it come from?

My guess is Cheney. The Bush-Cheney relationship remains as sealed as the one between Bush and his wife. Woodward seems to have been a fly on the White House wall, but we learn little about what Bush and Cheney discussed outside of formal meetings. We do know, though, that Colin Powell considered Cheney obsessed with Iraq and so determined to make the case for war that the vice president exaggerated the threat and in some cases -- this is me talking now -- just plain lied.

The real news is not exactly what Bush says, but that he says it at all. Here is a man convinced that he did the right thing, that -- despite contrary evidence -- there was some sort of link between Saddam and terrorism and, as he told Mexican President Vicente Fox, ``The security of the United States is on the line.''

This is what Bush said on the eve of the war and what, presumably, he still believes. When Woodward asked him last December what his reaction had been to Powell's private warning that things could go bad in postwar Iraq, Bush said, ``And my reaction to that is, is that my job is to secure America. And that I also believe that freedom is something people long for. And that if given the chance, the Iraqis over time would seize the moment. My frame of mind is focused on what I told you -- the solemn duty to protect America.''

Those, though, were not the aims Powell had questioned -- but, instead, the difficulties of implementing them in an ethnically fractured land where democracy was historically unknown. Bush had simply ignored all of that because, essentially, he believed what he believed.

(c) 2004, Washington Post Writers Group


I am freaked out by this. Partly by clear confirmation about what we suspected before the war, but more so by it's source. I can't wait to read the damned book. Has anyone read it yet?

 

Just reviewed the interview: points I missed/forgot in first post( sorry, but there's a lot of huge HUGE stuff here;


To clarify how Woodward came to get such interview time: He had spent over a year of intense research and plumbing of his many deep connections in the intelligence community, White House, etc., and had accumulated a lot of evidence in the form of transcripts, files, etc. He sent the WH an outline of what he had uncovered, and their response was " Well,you're going to write the story anyway, so why don't you get Bush ( etc.)'s reasons for doing what he did. He didn't really try to deny ANY of Woodward's findings, merely wanted him to understand his convictions and vision that lead him to take the actions he did.

This was also done in part because Bush felt that Bush On War was fairly even handed.


* The US had covert troops in place BEFORE we had even gotten approval for operations.


* Rumsfeld took a poll of his top advisers as to how long the entire war would take ( for absolute control), and the estimates ran from 7 to 30 days, total.

* That despite the severe objections coming from Powell and the people at State, the war argument took on it's own momentum, and there was a serious sense that the enthusiasm for the war plan itself and the totality of the work expeneded on it was a significant force in leading the administration towards Iraq in spite of any and all objections, intel contradictions, or opposition, foreign or domestic.

* Woodward said he was simply amazed at the totality of Bush's conviction. He has absolutely no doubts, of anything about this. He feels he has been ordained to complete this mission, and no inconvenient facts are going to dissuade his fiath that what he has done is correct. He firmly believes there are WMDs in Iraq, he firmly believes Iraq was connected with 9-11, and he firmly believes that the people of Iraq will embrace democracy, American style, and will be gratefull to us for making them take it.


Now I have to admit something here: I WAS DEAD WRONG.

I honestly think my take on the war has been pretty bang on from the get go, but I have usually overlooked or marginalized the degree to which Bush and Cheney's religious convictions have shaped this entire enterprise. I was even somewhat slow to recognize that Cheney, whom I used to respect as a down to earth realist, has become an out and out idealogogue. I did anticipate that their vision of a reverse domino theory in the Middle East was part of the picture, but not this much, nor how fervently and unshakeably they were focusing on this.

But the degree to which they feel this is a holy calling...wow. Floored. Never, ever would have thought they would be that zealous or influenced by their religious beliefs in terms of national policy. Am even more amazed that they are being this open about it.


In one respect, I am impressed that Bush, who isn't that bright, seems at least to be a man of conviction. Of course, like many zealots, he doesn't mind oe'rleaping other, more conventional moral lines like lying to the public, etc. if it accomplishes what he envisions as his devinely appointed task. It's as or more frightening as the picture I had before...talk about your lunatic fringe, and this one in power...but it's not as corrupt, at heart, as I had begun to picture him. The corruption, like most fanatics, comes from conviction, not from self-serving wants.


But, in my mind, this verifies all that we were saying before, during, and since the war: that the argument was just a sell, that it was pre-ordained, that we were lied to, that they knew about the faulty intel and only cared in so far as it interrupted the sale of the war, that the post-invasion plan was based on an idealogical premise so navie and arrogant as to stagger belief, and that we can't get these guys out of office soon enough.

But it also backs up a couple of theories I've espoused: that Bush, Cheney et al believed, as did most of us, that the WMD's were there, and unlike most of us believed, at least Bush did that Saddam was connected to 9-11. I am sure Cheney wouldn't have thought it something Sadam wouldn't do, but don't know if he believed he actually had. But the point was that they knowingly presented false intel for two reasons:

1) Because, at least when it came to the WMD, they thought it likely to be true anyways.

2) Because it was only a primary reason for war in the sale to the public, and selling it was all that mattered. The New Jerusalem that would result was the end which justified any means.



In the end, though, while it paints a less corrupt for self's sake version of Bush, this actually makes him unbelievably terrifying to have in power of a militia, let alone the country. That there's two of them in there, and that Powell was, in fact, playing the Good Soldier in public all along, but fighting and losing the good fight behind the scenes...wow. The election can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned. God, I'm glad Dubya wasn't in charge during a tense Cold War moment...