[Media-watch] Bob Woodward book says Bush ordered Iraq plans in Nov 2001 - Bloomberg - April 17 2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aes.ACYn7NfQ&refer=top_world_news


Bush Ordered Iraq Plans in November 2001, Book Says (Update5)
April 17 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush ordered up an Iraq war plan
in November 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington, and while the U.S. military was still trying to oust Taliban
leaders in Afghanistan who harbored the attackers, a new book says.

``Let's get started on this,'' Bush recalled telling Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001, according to ``Plan of Attack'' by
Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, a Post account of
the book says. ``And get (Army General) Tommy Franks looking at what it
would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to.''

The account and excerpts from the book, published in an early version of the
Post's Sunday edition, support testimony by former White House
counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke that the Bush administration was
focused more on Iraq than the al- Qaeda terrorists blamed for the attacks.
In a book by Ron Suskind published earlier this year, former Treasury
Secretary Paul O'Neill said the president began planning to oust Hussein
within weeks of taking office in January 2001.

``What it amounts to is what the intelligence people would call
multiple-source confirmation that the Bush presidency arrived in office with
an agenda,'' said Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former Vice
President Al Gore. ``They used Sept. 11 as a way to realize that agenda.''

Powell Opposition

The Woodward book, which will go on sale Monday, says Secretary of State
Colin Powell opposed the war and warned Bush that if he sent U.S. troops to
Iraq ``you're going to be owning this place.''

The relationship between war-proponent Vice President Dick Cheney and
Powell, who believed Cheney was trying to establish a connection between
Iraq and al-Qaeda, became so strained that they are barely on speaking
terms, according to the book. White House communications director Dan
Bartlett described Powell's agreement to make the U.S. case against Hussein
at the United Nations in February 2003 as ``the Powell buy-in,'' the book
says.

In the UN speech by Powell and others by Bush, the administration argued
that Iraq had to be attacked because it possessed weapons of mass
destruction. At a meeting in December 2002, the book says, Central
Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet told Bush ``it's a slam-dunk
case'' that Iraq dictator Hussein had such weapons at his disposal. Those
weapons haven't been found.

`Preponderance of Evidence'

Woodward's book, combined with the O'Neill and Clarke accounts, ``is not
going to help the president's credibility,'' said Lawrence Korb, a former
assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan.

``It's pretending to do one thing and doing another,'' Korb said in an
interview yesterday. ``If you look at the preponderance of evidence, it
becomes pretty clear'' that Bush was focused on Iraq after the Sept. 11
attacks, Korb said.

Bush, 57, said yesterday he didn't recall whether he ordered Rumsfeld to
draw up war plans two months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

``I can't remember exact dates that far back,'' Bush told reporters
yesterday after talks at the White House with British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, his chief Iraq ally. ``But I do know that it was Afghanistan that was
on my mind. And I didn't really start focusing on Iraq until later on.''

The White House declined to comment today on Woodward's book, which is being
published by Viacom Inc.'s Simon & Schuster.

Iraq Casualties

Korb said the book may have resonance because of steady U.S. casualties in
Iraq. ``Now that things are not going too well, people are going to say:
`Wait a second. Why did we go there and you made up your mind before all the
evidence was in,''' he said.

Ninety coalition soldiers have died this month in Iraq in some of the
deadliest fighting since U.S. and British troops ousted Hussein a year ago.
About 20,000 U.S. soldiers scheduled to come home after a year of combat now
will stay for another three months, Rumsfeld said on Thursday.

Korb is a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for American
Progress, a research group that says one of its missions is offering
``thoughtful critique and clear alternatives'' to ``conservative
proposals.''

On Oct. 7, 2001, British and U.S. forces began an aerial campaign in
Afghanistan against the Taliban regime, which harbored Osama bin Laden's
al-Qaeda network. The Dec. 7 fall of the Afghan town of Spin Boldak marked
the end of Taliban control. Bin Laden, a Saudi fugitive, wasn't captured and
continues to elude U.S. forces.

Secret Planning

In late November 2001, ``things were becoming increasingly clear that the
Taliban were not going to have a hold in Afghanistan,'' White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday.

At that time, Bush ``talked to Secretary Rumsfeld about planning related to
Iraq,'' McClellan said, although ``there is a difference between planning
and making a decision.''

The Bush administration didn't begin to publicly argue for war against Iraq
until August 2002, when Cheney said in a speech to the National Convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Iraq probably possessed weapons of mass
destruction and couldn't be allowed to grow stronger.

Bush said secrecy in planning the Iraq war was needed to avoid ``enormous
international angst and domestic speculation'' and that ``war is my absolute
last option,'' Woodward reports, based on three and a half hours of
interviews with Bush.

Franks worked in secret with a small staff, talked almost daily with Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld and met about once a month with Bush, according to the
book. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was the only member of
Bush's war cabinet whom Bush directly asked for a recommendation of whether
to go to war, the book says.

Cheney's Role

``I could tell what they thought,'' the president told Woodward, according
to the book. ``I didn't need to ask their opinion about Saddam Hussein or
how to deal with Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could
be pretty clear.''

By early January 2003, Bush had made up his mind to attack Iraq, Woodward
writes. The war started on March 19, 2003.

The book characterizes Vice President Cheney as a ``steamrolling force'' for
the war. Before Bush's January 2001 inauguration, Cheney asked President
Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary William Cohen to include ``discussion about
Iraq and different options'' as part of the traditional briefing given to a
new president, Woodard writes, according to the Post account.

Powell was a vocal critic, calling one proposal by Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz to seize Iraq's southern oilfields ``lunacy,'' according to
the book. Powell, a retired Army general, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff during the 1991 war in which Bush's father, President George H.W.
Bush, drove Hussein from Kuwait.

Public Doubts

Republicans including House Majority leader Dick Armey, former Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger, and General Brent Scowcroft, who was national
security adviser to Bush's father, had all expressed reservations before
Cheney's speech in August 2002 about the threat from Iraq.

The elder Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, urged caution in
confronting Hussein in an August 2002 commentary in the New York Times:
``The costs in all areas will be much greater, as will the political risks,
both domestic and international, if we end up going it alone or with only
one or two other countries,'' Baker wrote.

Opposition to the decision to go to war in Iraq grew this month, a poll by
the Annenberg Public Policy Center found. Fifty- one percent of those polled
in the first two weeks of April said the situation in Iraq wasn't worth
going to war over, compared with 43 percent who said it was worth it. That's
a drop in support for the war from last month, when more respondents
supported the invasion.

More than 1,250 people were interviewed April 1-14 for the poll, which has a
margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Bush's job approval
was 53 percent, compared with 50 percent in March, the poll said.