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Bush vs. Saddam: It was inevitable
Book Review By THOMAS S. AXWORTHY, Saturday, Apr. 24, 2004
"Plan of Attack", By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 467 pages, $40.50

Bob Woodward made his name as a junior reporter in the Watergate scoop when, along with his colleague Carl Bernstein, he diligently followed lead after lead and finally traced the trail of abuse all the way to the Oval Office. Watergate forced Richard Nixon to resign, while Woodward co-authored All the President's Men and was even played in the movie version by Robert Redford. For journalists, this is as close to Nirvana as it gets.

In Plan of Attack, the 11th book by Woodward, we see how the world, and Woodward, have changed. Rather than following a series of tips and intelligent guesswork to get the story, Woodard is now a Washington celebrity with a fame that surpasses most of his sources. Today, when Bob Woodward calls, everyone responds, even the President of the United States, who granted the author two long interviews that form the centre of Plan of Attack. Woodward is still diligent -- he interviewed 75 key influential figures for the book - but now his work reflects the inner Washington view rather than the outsider perspective that so animated All the President's Men.

But Plan of Attack, the story of how and why George W. Bush went to war against Iraq, still contains many surprises, as Woodward's sources, most of them -- except the President -- not on the record, give their version of why Bush made his fateful decision to go to war, in the main hope of transforming the Middle East. This is the third recent book that documents the Bush administration's Iraq fetish: In The Price of Loyalty, former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that in the first months of the Bush presidency, Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden, was the target of the Cheney-Rumsfeld circle of neoconservatives; and in Richard Clarke's Against all Enemies, the former anti-terrorism chief revealed that in the first hours after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush asked him about Iraq's involvement, not al-Qaeda's. Woodward confirms these incidents and adds a bushel more.

Woodward verifies O'Neill's account that the Principals Committee, the body of senior officials concerned with national security, was consumed with Iraq, and not with bin Laden. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence, argued in the summer of 2001 that it was necessary and relatively easy to get rid of Saddam. Secretary of State Colin Powell, a key source for Woodward's book, thought "this is lunacy." He went to the President and pleaded, "Don't let yourself get pushed into anything until you are ready. . . . You don't have to be bullied into this." "I've got it," the president replied, "I know it."

Woodward also supports Clarke's account that Iraq, not al-Qaeda, was the main focus of Bush's team even after Sept. 11: Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, was in the Pentagon on Sept. 11 and went through the harrowing near-death experience of having a plane hit his building and kill 184 people. Yet at 2:40 p.m., with dust and smoke filling the operations centre, Rumsfeld raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks. The next day, in the inner circle of Bush's war cabinet, Rumsfeld asked if the terrorist attacks did not present an "opportunity" to launch against Iraq.

Woodward's book is full of such gems. He reveals that as early as Nov. 21, 2001, President Bush asked his defence secretary to prepare a war plan for Iraq, but to keep it secret because a leak would raise "enormous international angst and domestic speculation." In December, 2002, after tough questioning by Bush, George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told the President that intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk," and Woodward, astonishingly, reveals that Bush had decided on war in January, 2003, months before a debate in the United Nations. The President told his closest aides that "time is not on our side here . . . we're going to have to go to war."

Bush made that decision after talking to Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and even the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, before he got around to informing his secretary of state, Colin Powell. Months earlier, Powell had warned Bush that if he went to war, "You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all." Powell's eerily prescient warnings were, of course, ignored, with the consequences that we see every night on the news.

For Canadians, our great debate over Iraq receives the attention our country usually receives in Washington: In a 443-page book, there is exactly one paragraph about Canada. An unnamed Canadian "counterpart" to Rice (almost certainly Claude Laverdure, then Jean Chrétien's foreign policy adviser, now Canada's ambassador to France) told Rice on March 20, 2003, "Sorry, we can't be part of this," but promised to keep the rhetoric at low boil, "just enough to satisfy Canadian public opinion but without being belligerent or provocative." Not exactly a profile in courage.

The overwhelming thesis of Plan of Attack is that Iraq was an obsession, an idée fixe of the Bush neoconservatives. They were determined to fix the leftover remains of Bush senior's Gulf War by deposing Saddam.

Colin Powell believed, according to Woodward, that for Vice-President Cheney, the secretary of defence under Bush senior, Iraq was a "fever" and that he misread and exaggerated intelligence about the Iraqi threat and alleged terrorist ties. "Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice-president. But there it was."

Plan of Attack is chilling. It reveals how a small group of men in powerful positions can mislead a people and take them to war. There was a good case for deposing Saddam Hussein, but the Bush administration never made it. Instead they fixated on weapons of mass destruction -- "a slam dunk" -- and fictitious ties to terrorism. The late historian Barbara Tuchman, in March to Folly, believed that humankind "makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity." Plan of Attack offers more than 400 pages in support of Tuchman's melancholy thesis.

Thomas S. Axworthy is chairman of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Queen's University. He served as principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau 1981-84.
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McCain: Iraq plan was 'inadequate'
Senator: Rumsfeld should have overruled generals


(CNN) -- The Pentagon should have known it needed more troops in Iraq and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have overruled his generals on the matter, Sen. John McCain said Thursday night. "I was there last August. I came back after talking with many, many people, and I was convinced we didn't have enough boots on the ground," said the senator from Arizona and decorated Vietnam War veteran. McCain made his case on CNN's "Larry King Live" a few hours after Rumsfeld announced that 20,000 U.S. troops scheduled to come home from Iraq would be held another 90 days. (Full story)

The extended tour of duty will help the United States maintain combat strength amid battles that have killed at least 90 American service members this month. Critics have accused Rumsfeld of underestimating the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion last year. Rumsfeld acknowledged Thursday that he had not expected U.S. troops to continue facing fierce fighting more than a year after the invasion. "I certainly would not have estimated that we would have had the number of individuals lost that we have had lost in the last week," Rumsfeld said.

McCain, while voicing enormous admiration for Rumsfeld, said he knew months ago that the U.S. military would "pay a heavy price" for being understaffed, and he called the secretary's planning "inadequate." "I'm saying it's not an accident that this was the bloodiest month of the war since combat ended, and we need to adjust," he said. Despite the early military planning mistakes, McCain said, "I think we must succeed in Iraq. We cannot fail. We must do whatever's necessary."

He said one thing that was necessary was a long-range plan that included "significant troop increases for a long period of time." McCain dismissed claims from Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials that they were providing as many troops as commanders on the ground in Iraq requested. "The decisions have to be made at the highest level," McCain said, noting how previous presidents made tough decisions despite their generals' opposition. "Harry Truman overruled Douglas MacArthur. Abraham Lincoln overruled his generals. Franklin Delano Roosevelt overruled his military people because -- as Napoleon said -- war is too important to be left to the generals." McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years, acknowledged that "things go wrong in war. Mistakes happen." "I think we missed an opportunity during the first six months or so of our occupation of Iraq," he said.

He predicted that U.S. forces will be able to retake cities now under insurgent control. "But putting down the kind of insurgency, which is becoming more and more sophisticated every day, is going to be a real challenge," he said. He also warned that "any kind of coalition, no matter how loose, between Shiites and Sunnis" would be an enormous problem for the United States. He said the recent kidnapping of civilian truck driver Thomas Hamill of Mississippi and those of other foreign nationals in Iraq signaled a new tactic by insurgents. "He, of course, has been in every living room in America, and this is an attempt to erode our national will," McCain said. He said "the message to these brutal, unspeakable scum" should be that "if you harm him, we will track you down, we will find you, and you will pay. And they have to be absolutely sure of that."

McCain predicted that, after the war, the Pentagon would find filling the military ranks to be difficult because the battles in Iraq are being fought with a force that is nearly 40 percent National Guard members and reservists -- who did not expect this kind of duty. "They'll serve and they'll fight and they'll do magnificently, but keeping them in is going to be, I think, a very difficult proposition," said McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He also urged an immediate expansion of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps.
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Freed French hostage recounts ordeal
Thursday, April 15, 2004 Posted: 2:16 PM EDT

(CNN) -- Kidnappers in Iraq freed French journalist Alexandre Jordanov, 40, on Wednesday. He works for Capa Television in Paris and was kidnapped Sunday and released four days later. He spoke to CNN International Anchor Ralitsa Vassileva.

Vassileva: How did they decide to release you, how was that decision made?

Jordanov: You never know how the decision is made, because you have to deal with a lot of different factions from the Fedayeen Saddam to the al-Sadr people, to the Islamic party. And they hand you over from one to the next, and the last one, the Islamic Party, decided to drop me off at the Grand Mosque in Baghdad.

Vassileva: Media reports say they decided to trop you off, that's what they say, because you were not part of the occupation alliance.

Jordanov: I'm not sure that is correct. I do not think a French passport is a guarantee of safety in Iraq. It certainly helps, but considering the first four days I spent with various amounts of people it didn't seem to be proecting me from anything. I think it was more of a political decision, or some sort of a close human rapport I had with my last captors, that they decided to release me.

Vassileva: The human rapport was a very important factor?

Jordanov: That's what my gut feeling is, yes.

Vassileva: Tell me more about the conditions in which you were held.

Jordanov: The conditions were pretty much OK, they made sure you ate well, they try to keep you up all the time, asking you all kinds of questions, and since you change groups all the time, you have to go over and over and over the same sorts of questions. Humiliation was a great part of the technique.

Vassileva: What did they do? Did they torture you?

Jordanov: They would take you outside and make you believe they were going to kill you. Or they would take you to the bathroom and watch you go to the bathroom with like three guys with Kalashnikovs. Or they would ask you strange questions about the Bible. Or they would ask you sexual questions and things like that. It is a very fine line you have to choose. There's very little margin for error in your answers so you have to remain humble and neutral in your answers to try to stay alive, basically.

Vassileva: Where did they keep you?

Jordanov: They move you around -- in four days they moved me to 10 different locations ...madrasas (Islamic religious schools), a farm, or a house, or an abandoned cement factory. it changes all the time and you never really know where it is since you are blindfolded during you transportation.

Vassileva: Was there any particular message that your kidnappers wanted you to convey as they released you?

Jordanov: At one point they did make a tape that they supposedly were going to take to our network but they never did. They dressed me up in a jelabiya and they were all around me, with Kalashnikovs, and they read some sort of political message which I couldn't understand since it was in Arabic. But they never released the tape to the network.

Vassileva: Thank you so much for talking to us about your ordeal.

Jordanov: You're welcome.
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The Deployment in Iraq - Foreign Trops in Iraq - April 2004

COALITION TROOPS IN IRAQ: TOP CONTRIBUTORS
United States: 135,000
UK: 8,700
Italy: 3,000
Poland: 2,400
Ukraine: 1,650
Spain: 1,300
Netherlands: 1,150
Australia: 850
Japan: 550
Bulgaria: 485
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