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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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State of
Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Indictment After reading
the third installment of Bob Woodward’s Bush at War series, State of
Denial, I wondered why administration figures talk to him. As a result of
his countless relationships in Washington, Woodward seems to talk to
everyone, and as a result, pieces together a description of what goes on
behind the scenes that can make for compelling and depressing reading. In
this volume, he stresses the creation of an alternate reality by the
administration that led them toward denial of what was really happening. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 23, pp. 240-3: Rumsfeld just was not
paying attention, Rice and Hadley had concluded by August 2003. He was not
showing the same interest in postwar Iraq as he had with the military
invasion plans. The only option was for the NSC to step in and manage Bremer
more directly. Rice needed someone
dedicated to the task, and she thought of the man who had been her boss on
the NSC in George H. W. Bush’s administration. Robert D. Blackwill, 63, had
recently resigned as ambassador to India to teach at Harvard. Blackwill had served 22
years in the foreign service and had worked in the upper reaches of the State
Department, including a stint as an aide to Henry Kissinger. At 6-foot-3 and
heavyset with white hair, he looked like Santa Claus when he smiled. But he
was a prickly, demanding boss, who often referred to himself as Godzilla. In
India, he had roiled the embassy staff. Two State Department inspector
general reports criticized his management style. Hadley, the consummate
staff man, started canvassing people who had worked with Blackwill. The
general report: Don’t bring him in.
He’ll be disruptive. He has a terrible reputation. People don’t want to work
with him. He’s after your job, and he has even let it be known he wants to be
Condi’s deputy. Al Kamen’s popular “In the Loop” column in The Washington Post in July had quoted
unnamed officials—”mischief makers,” Kamen called them—suggesting that Hadley
might move over to the Pentagon to make room for Blackwill. But Rice wanted Blackwill’s
brainpower, so she and Hadley called him to the White House. They summarized
the rap on him, and said there would be new rules of civility and
collegiality if he joined the NSC staff. “I hear you,” Blackwill
said. “I understand exactly what you’re saying and I tell you that you will
not have cause to complain.” In a second tough session,
Rice asked Blackwill if he would have trouble working for her, his former
subordinate, or for Hadley. He said he would not. Blackwill was given the
exalted title of coordinator for strategic planning on the NSC staff. Soon
Rice made him point man for Iraq. After a couple of weeks
Blackwill told Rice and Hadley. “We’re losing. We’re just losing this whole
thing. The public opinion’s going against us. This is awful. We’re losing the
battle for Iraq heart and soul.” Rice’s immediate concern
was not the situation on the ground in Iraq. The problem, she told Blackwill,
was “the dysfunctional U.S. government.” He soon understood what she meant.
He attended the deputies committee meetings where Armitage and Doug Feith
often sat across from each other in the Situation Room. The hostility between
them was enormous, and Blackwill watched as Armitage, a mountain of a man,
barked at Feith. It was almost as if Armitage wanted to reach across the
table and snap Feith’s neck like a twig. Armitage’s knuckles even turned
white. The principals meetings or
NSC meetings with Powell and Rumsfeld were not as coarse but had the same
surreal quality, rarely airing the real issues. Blackwill, a veteran of the
Kissinger style, was astonished. Rumsfeid made his presentation looking at
the president, while Powell looked straight ahead. Then Powell would make his
to the president with Rumsfeld looking straight ahead. They didn’t even
comment on each other’s statements or views. So Bush never had the benefit of
a serious, substantive discussion between his principal advisers. And the
president, whose legs often jiggled under the table, did not force a discussion. Blackwill saw Rice try to
intervene and get nowhere. So critical comments and questions—especially
about military strategy—never surfaced. Blackwill felt sympathy for Rice.
This young woman, he thought, had to deal with three of the titans of
national security—Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powellafl of whom had decades of
experience, cachet and Strong views. The image locked in Blackwill’s mind of
Rice, dutiful, informed and polite, at one end of the table, and the
inexperienced president at the other, legs dancing, while the bulls staked
out their ground, almost snorting defiantly, hoofs pawing the table, daring a
challenge that never came. David Kay’s people
developed a solid explanation for why Saddam’s regime had been so bent on
acquiring 60,000 aluminum tubes. Powell had told the U.N. the tubes were for
a centrifuge system to be used in Saddam’s nuclear weapons program. The
evidence now showed that the tubes were meant for conventional artillery
shells, just as the Iraqis had maintained before the war. The propellant for
the rockets was produced by an Iraqi company run by a close friend of
Saddam’s son Qusay. The propellant was lousy, but nobody in the Iraqi
military had the clout to tell a friend of Qusay’s to improve his products or
lose the contract. So the artillery scientists came up with a work-around:
tighten the specifications on the aluminum tubes, making them smaller and
lighter so that the weak propellant would still work. One of the prisoners the
U.S. was holding and interrogating was the former head of the procurement arm
of the Iraqi military. “We bought these tubes because we had a contract,” he
said under interrogation. He explained the bureaucratic process, and how they
had felt that tightening the specifications was the only option. Kay’s group
tracked down some of the military officers involved in the rocket program,
who confirmed the story. “We never wanted these,” one said. “We kept trying
to cancel the contract but they told us we had to honor the contract.” To Kay, it almost sounded
like a Washington or Pentagon contracting scandal, with $500 toilet seats and
$1,000 hammers. Kay’s team uncovered
evidence showing how Saddam spied on and tracked the U.N. inspection
programs. At one point, they found a full set of faxes that U.N. inspectors
had sent back and forth between Baghdad, New York and Vienna, home of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, which oversaw prewar WMD inspections in
Iraq. These were not electronic intercepts, but were the actual faxes, which
meant that the Iraqis had spies or agents of some kind who could get physical
access to the JAEA offices. In one case Kay saw that a fax the Iraqis had
taken was an original, with handwritten notes that a member of his inspection
team had made on the document years earlier. Kay had extraordinary incentives
to offer Iraqis for proof of WMD, including $10 million from a CIA covert
fund that he could use to pay informants. He could also provide green cards
to cooperative Iraqis who wanted to live and work in the United States. His
group could move people out of Iraq and relocate them to other countries.
They put out word of the program on the street hoping to attract genuine
informers, and about 100 people came forward with information that seemed
good enough to investigate. But virtually nothing panned out, and Kay wound
up moving only one person to the U.S. It was all “I didn’t see, but my
neighbor saw.” Others were coming in with pieces of equipment, making up
stories and saying, oh, this came from a chemical weapon. There were all
sorts of hoaxes. At another point, Kay’s
communication teams were able to eavesdrop on a conversation an Iraqi
scientist had with his wife, who was pleading with her husband. They were
desperate, and she was begging him to go tell the Americans anything so that
they could get some of the reward money and leave the country. “I don’t know anything,”
the scientist said. “We didn’t have anything. I can’t give the Americans
anything. We didn’t have it.” Kay had interrogators
interview all of the senior Iraqi officials in U.S. custody. It was amazing.
None of the Iraqis had actually seen any WMD, but they all believed that such
unconventional weapons existed somewhere else in Saddam’s arsenal. To a
person, they assumed that Saddam Hussein was making a lot of public noise
about destroying his weapons stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War for the
benefit of the rest of the world, but that he’d never really be stupid enough
to actually follow through. But it looked more and more like that was exactly
what Saddam had done. Through the end of
September, Kay’s group made lots of ambiguous discoveries-“dual use”
production facilities or chemicals that could be used for either weapons or
non-WMD products. Chlorine could be used to make chemical weapons, or it
could be used to purify water for swimming pools. Kay never had a Eureka!
moment, but he gradually concluded that the reason they weren’t finding WMD
stockpiles was because they simply didn’t exist. State of
Denial is an indictment of the Bush adminstration over the many blunders
relating to Iraq. Even those who support the President will come away from
this book with sadness about what has happened. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2007 |
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·
2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/State
of Denial.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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