Ray McGovern:Court Historian Woodward Disguises Bush Aims in Invading Iraq

[Dudley_DUright]

Why is Bob Woodward’s latest book, “Plan of Attack,” is being promoted by the administration? Because it portrays an in-charge President Bush and presents him as genuinely concerned (and seemingly misled) over the threat posed by Iraq’s “weapons of mass-destruction.” Unfortunately, the nation’s most-famous investigative reporter got it wrong.

You would not know from Woodward’s book that the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction – used with Congress to hype the threat - was written several months after the administration decided to make war on Iraq. That decision had little to do with WMD or with supposed ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It had everything to do with the imperative seen by Bush’s neoconservative advisers to gain dominant influence over strategic, oil-rich Iraq and to eliminate any possible threat to Israel’s security. With that twin aim, the rationale was generally consistent with several decades of U.S. policy objectives in the Middle East. Where the Bush administration broke new ground was in its decision to launch a preemptive war when there was nothing to preempt.

To honest analysts—including some within the “coalition of the willing”—the actual U.S. purpose was a no-brainer. Australian intelligence analysts, for example, had done their homework in reading the neoconservatives’ rationale in the documents of the Project for a New American Century and were able to make confident judgments regarding underlying U.S. motives. Senior Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie has testified to his Parliament that Australian intelligence gave his government “detailed assessments in which it was made very clear that the U.S. was intent on invading Iraq for more important reasons than WMD and terrorism. Hence, all this talk about WMD and terrorism was hollow.”

The U.S. Congress was not likely to acquiesce in attacking Iraq on the basis of the strategic vision of the neoconservatives. Rather, it was necessary to coerce our lawmakers by conjuring up ominous specters like the frequently adduced “mushroom cloud.” Enter the NIE on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction prepared hurriedly in September 2002. Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that the target audience for the Estimate was Congress. The NIE and its various initial drafts became the centerpiece of a successful campaign to persuade our elected representatives to relinquish to the executive the war-making power vested solely in them by the framers of the Constitution.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0430-04.htm

[Miss Authoritiva]

1. Bush still looks stupid.

"(W)hen the briefing was over Bush turned to Tenet and remarked, “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?” Woodward writes that Tenet assured the president that it was “a slam-dunk case...."

So Bush was doubtful, Tenet said the magic phrase (slam-dunk), and then we go to war? This makes Bush the Master and Commander?

And is "the best we've got" the same exceedingly quantity-specific list that Powell enumerated at the UN? And if it is, why did Bush initially think that it wasn't good enough?

[Jack Rabbit]

2. A must read

Woodward's book is of value, but it is not the whole story. He got much of this information from self-serving junta insiders, including the dictator himself. He thus tells a story of a leader who was deceived.

Even between the lines of Woodward's tome (or what I have read of it), one sees that much of deception of Bush was his own willful ignorance. We may fault Tenet for calling the case against Saddam a "slam dunk" after presenting the best evidence, which was flimsy; however, Bush saw that evidence, too, and was, according to Woodward, asking "Is this all you have?" Without any good reason to accept the judgment that the case against Saddam was a "slam dunk" and every reason to know that judgment was crap, Bush went to war.

Tenet should not have called it a "slam dunk", but Bush knew as well as anybody that it was nothing of the sort.

The deceptions were systemic and institutional. The decision was made to go to war without the facts and regardless of the facts. The intelligence community was directed to make the facts fit the decision. The result was the lies we were told, the lies that Powell presented to the Security Council, the lies that are exposed daily, the lies that we who demonstrated against Bush ahead of the invasion knew were lies.

I believe it was Lenin was called facts "stubborn things." Bush is finding that out daily. It was also the Blue Fairy who told Pinocchio that a lie only grows and grows until it is "as obvious as the nose on your face." Bush is discovering that daily, too, with every act of popular resistance in Iraq.