[Bizarro World]
Like Rats from a Stinking Ship
Recall how all those who supported Bush's trigger-happy boobishness were regarded as "muscular realists"? Well, ever more of them spring away from their past (Powell, Freidman, Kerry). The latest? His Highness Bob Woodward:
The book is the third that Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, has written on the Bush administration since the terrorist attacks of September, 11, 2001. The first two were attacked by critics of the Bush administration as depicting the president in a heroic light. But the new book's title, "State of Denial," conveys the different picture that Woodward paints of the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.The Times picks up the thread:
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.”How many serious people lost their credibility when they abondoned their minds and signed on with wee Dubya?
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.
1 comment:
When history looks back on this "comma", I hope no criticism is spared. I especially enjoyed this Bon Mot:
"Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet became so concerned about the communications that intelligence agencies were receiving indicating a terrorist attack was imminent, he went to the White House with counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black -- without an appointment -- to meet with Rice, then the national security adviser. He and Black hoped the meeting would alert Rice to the urgency they felt.
But Tenet and Black felt that Rice gave them 'the brush-off,' according to Woodward, telling them that a plan for coherent action against bin Laden was already in the works. Woodward writes that both Tenet and Black felt that the meeting was the starkest warning the White House was given about bin Laden.
The book describes Tenet as feeling that Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the bin Laden threat but that she had not understood it in time. Black described his frustration more directly, according to Woodward: 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'
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