[extropy-chat] From Bob Woodwards book Plan of Attack

Sat Jul 16 08:55:11 UTC 2005

The following are the last few pages of the epilogue of Bob Woodward's book written March 1, 2004. and so, before George W Bush was re-elected

and before a new Iraqi government had been established, if indeed it can said to be established even now. 

I got a lot out of the book, because I wanted to know the mind of George W Bush and some of the key players in his administration about the Iraq war and I thought Bob Woodward of  'Watergate' and of The Washington Post would tell the story accurately. He was able to inview the people including the president personally. Others may be interested also, and may want to read the book. I recommend it.  I think it might become an interesting historical document if George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are impeached. 

--------------

On February 5, 2004, the one-year anniversary of Powell's WMD presentation to the U.N., he [George Tenet CIA director] made a rare speech at Georgetown University.

"We are nowhere near 85 percent finished," he said of the WMD search, directly disputing Kay's public statement. "Any call I make today is necessarily provisional. Why? Because we need more time and we need more data." He said that they had discovered that Iraq had research and development, intent and capability to produce chemical and biological weapons. Halfway through the speech he acknowledged they had not found biological or chemical weapons.

The CIA was reviewing and examining everything in order to improve its performance, and had discovered that one of their sources had "fabricated" information, Tenet said. He noted that the CIA's human spies had provided the information that had led to the capture of some top al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and had played a key role in uncovering the secret nuclear proliferation network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program who had helped Libya, Iran and North Korea with their nuclear programs. During the ongoing investigations and reviews, they would have to be careful he warned. "We cannot afford an environment to develop where analysts are afraid to make a call, where judgments are held back because analysts fear they will be wrong."

In a sense, Tenet was asking that there be little or no price to pay for being wrong. Given the aftermath of 9/11 and the ongoing al Qaeda threat, the CIA had adopted a mentality of warning-at-any-cost. For years the problem had been getting the attention of the policy makers and the public. Of course, it was one thing to be wrong about warning of an attack on the United States. Tenet and all the senior officials in the CIA were certain al Qaeda would attack again. Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt told associates in early 2004, "We'll still get hit again. We'll still get a massive hit of some kind. Absolutely. Absolutely." But, he added, "If five years passes, six years, seven years passes and we don't have one, I will be perfectly satisfied and comfortable having been wrong." But being wrong about information that Saddam possessed biological and chemical weapons - the basis for war - could hardly leave anyone satisfied and comfortable.

As Tenet went over the intelligence again and again, he acknowledged to associates that the CIA and he should have stated up front in the NIE and in other intelligence that the evidence was not ironclad, that it did not include a smoking gun.

"HOLY SHIT!" Powell said to himself as he read a copy of Tenet's speech. Here was the CIA director saying that the aluminum tubes they had previously been so confident were for use as centrifuges for enriching uranium were possibly for regular artillery shells. Powell remembered that he had challenged them on this before his U.N. presentation a year ago. John McLaughlin had gone into a long recitation about the thickness of the walls of the tubes and the spinning rates, arguing they had to be for centrifuges. Now Tenet was saying, "We have additional data to collect and more sources to question," and his agency "may have overestimated" the progress Saddam was making on development of nuclear weapons. Powell felt let down. 

Tenet was backing away from previous assertions of certainty on the alleged mobile biological labs. The CIA had earlier said it had five human sources for the claim, Powell remembered. Now Tenet was saying there was no consensus : "And I must tell you that we are finding discrepancies in some claims made by human sources about mobile biological weapons production before the war."

Powell let out another holy shit! He knew very well that Tenet had told the president "in brash New York language," as Powell once put it, that the case on WMD was a "slam dunk".

The president was the most visible manifestation of someone who had bought in. Powell was the second most visible, and he realized he was expendable. He knew that Tenet felt bad, and that as director he was looking out for the CIA. But this was a real mess. Powell found himself now asking the most intense and penetrating questions about anything the CIA said or told him. 

Powell did not share Armitage's concern that the two of them had been enablers for the Cheney-Rumsfeld hard-line policies. When he sorted out all the issues Powell felt that the State Department had done a good job and did not get sufficient credit for some of its successes such as improved relationships with China and Russia. 

Whenever anyone suggested that Powell should have pangs of conscience on the war, Powell said he had done everything in his power. In August 2002 he had nearly broken his spear, laying before the president all the difficulties of a war - the potential consequences and downsides. It was at a time when he thought the president was not getting the whole picture. He had warned the president. It was the president's decision, not his. Now the United States owned Iraq. Bush owned it. But Powell felt he had done his job. 

After Tenet's speech, the president had one message for this intelligence chief. "You did a great job," Bush told Tenet in a phone call.

For Rice, the process of going to war had been hard, and, she though, it should be hard. The aftermath was troubling, particularly the failure to find WMD.

She knew that intelligence is not fact. From all her years dealing with intelligence, going back to her time watching Russia on Bush senior's NSC staff, she was keenly aware that they relied on intelligence when they didn't know something. Though the CIA's intelligence on Iraq WMD was among the most categorical she had ever seen, intelligence has limitations as the basis for policy. It is more suggestive, reflecting possibilities and shadows rather than certainties. She had personally quizzed the agency's

national intelligence officer on the conclusions about Iraq WMD, asking at one point if 

the assertions were a fact or a judgment.

"It is a judgment," the officer had said.

As national security advisor, Rice did not dare to influence the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate, but given her closeness and status with Bush, if anyone could have warned the president to moderate his own categorical statements about WMD, it was Rice.

But Cheney had effectively preempted that issue on August 26, 2002, when he declared that there was "no doubt" Iraq had WMD. And the president had soon followed with his own statements of certainty even before the CIA's October NIE was issued.

As the WMD controversy grew in 2004, the president expressed his concerns to Rice. To air all the CIA's problems could have two negatives he wanted to avoid. First, the controversy would lead to congressional investigations like the Church and Pike Committees in 1975-1976 that revealed CIA spying on U.S. citizens, drug testing and assassination plots on foreign leaders. He did not want a new witch hunt, mindful of the history of investigations that he believed had demoralized the workforce and made the CIA risk-averse for a long time. Second, Bush did not want a future president hampered if there was a need to take preemptive action against another threat.

At 1.30 p.m. Friday, February 6, the president appeared in the press briefing room to announce what was now old news. He said he would appoint a nine-member commission to look at American intelligence capabilities and the intelligent about WMD worldwide.

It was to determine why some prewar intelligence about Iraq's alleged WMD had not been confirmed on the ground. Bush praised the people who work for the intelligence agencies as "dedicated professionals engaged in difficult and complex work. America's enemies are secretive. They are ruthless and they are resourceful. And in tracking and disrupting their activities our nation must bring to bear every tool and advantage at our command."

Then the president added, "Members if the commission will issue their report by March 31st, 2005."

One theme that emerged repeated in all the hours I spent interviewing the president and the hundreds of hours I spent interviewing others close to him or involved in the Iraq War decisions is Bush's conviction that he had made the right decision.

In the second interview with him, December 11, 2003, the president said he had once told Rice, " 'I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right.' I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so."

I asked if, as he had said at one of the meetings in the run-up to the war: "I would like to be a two-term president, but if I am a one-term president, so be it."

"That's right," the president replied. "That is my attitude. Absolutely right." He noted that things could have gone wrong on the ground, in the run-up, or they could have become trapped with endless U.N. weapons inspections.

"And if this decision costs you the election?" I asked.

"The presidency - that's the way it is," Bush said. "Fully prepared to live with it."

That day, after two hours, we stood in the Oval Office and started to walk out. Darkness was beginning to settle in outside. The upcoming presidential election would perhaps be the most immediate judgment on the war, but certainly not the last. How would history judges his Iraq War? I asked.

It would be impossible to get the meaning right in the short run, the president said, adding he thought it would take about ten years to understand the impact and true significance of the war. 

There will probably be cycles, I said. As Karl Rove believes, I reminded him, all history gets measured by outcomes.

Bush smiled. "History," he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. "We won't know. We'll all be dead."

-----

Brett Paatsch
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20050716/2f79f499/attachment.html>