Woodward book tells of Bush's march to war in Iraq

By The Associated Press and The Washington Post

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WASHINGTON — President Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in November 2001 while overseeing a divided national-security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, a new book says.

Journalist Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack," says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Vice President Dick Cheney developed — as Woodward puts it — an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.

Another key revelation: Bush in mid-2002 secretly approved the diversion of hundreds of millions of dollars meant for Afghanistan to projects that would set the stage for a massive deployment of U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf region.

The book will be available in bookstores next week and covers the 16 months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, will promote it tomorrow night on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Bush told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001 — less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan — to prepare for possible war with Iraq and kept some members of his closest circle in the dark, Woodward said.

In 3-½ hours of interviews with Woodward, Bush said he feared that if the plan had been revealed as the United States was fighting another conflict, that would cause "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."

"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as saying. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."

Asked yesterday about that Nov. 21, 2001, meeting with Rumsfeld, Bush said, "I can't remember dates that far back" but emphasized "it was Afghanistan that was on my mind, and I didn't really start focusing on Iraq till later on."

The White House later confirmed the discussion with Rumsfeld but said it did not mean Bush was set on a course of attacking Iraq at that time.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created momentum, according to Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam-dunk" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
 
Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was pressure from advocates of war inside the administration led by Cheney, whom Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force" who had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Saddam by force.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan while fighting another conflict.

By early January 2003, Bush had made up his mind to take military action against Iraq, according to the book. But Bush was so concerned that the government of his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, might fall because of his support for Bush that he delayed the war's start until March 19 — March 20 in Iraq — because Blair asked him to seek a second resolution from the United Nations. Bush later gave Blair the option of withholding British troops from combat, which Blair rejected.

Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Powell that became so strained that they barely are on speaking terms. Powell believed Cheney was obsessed with trying to establish a connection between Iraq and al-Qaida and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact, the author says.

Powell thought Cheney and his allies — his chief aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office — had established what amounted to a separate government. Cheney believed Powell mainly was concerned with his popularity.

Rumsfeld is portrayed as a "defense technocrat" intimately involved with details of the war planning but not focused on the need to attack Iraq in the same way that Cheney and some of Rumsfeld's subordinates were.

Asked personally by the president, Powell agreed to present the U.S. case against Saddam at the United Nations in February 2003, a presentation described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett as "the Powell buy-in." Bush wanted someone with Powell's credibility to present evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president initially had found less than convincing when presented by CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.

"Nice try," Bush said when he was finished, according to the book. "I don't think this quite — it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from."

He then turned to Tenet, McLaughlin's boss, and said, "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?"

"It's a slam-dunk case," Tenet replied. Bush pressed him again.

"Don't worry, it's a slam-dunk case," Tenet repeated.

Tenet later told associates he realized he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad, according to Woodward.

In his previous book, "Bush at War," Woodward described the administration's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. His new book, based on interviews with more than 75 people, including Bush and Rumsfeld, is a narrative of how Bush and his administration launched the war on Iraq.

In two separate interviews in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being "the beacon for freedom in the world."

"I believe we have a duty to free people," Bush told Woodward. "I would hope we wouldn't have to do it militarily, but we have a duty."

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq on March 19, 2003.

"Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. ... I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness."

The president told Woodward, "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."

The president told Woodward he was cooperating on his book because he wanted the story of how the United States had gone to war in Iraq to be told.

"But the news of this, in my judgment," Bush said, "the big news out of this isn't how George W. makes decisions. To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book as far as I'm concerned."

Bush's critics have questioned whether he and his administration were focused on Iraq rather than terrorism when they took office and even after the Sept. 11 attacks.

According to "Plan of Attack," Cheney was particularly focused on Iraq before Sept. 11. Before Bush's inauguration, Cheney sent word to departing Defense Secretary William Cohen that he wanted the traditional briefing given an incoming president to be a serious "discussion about Iraq and different options." Bush assigned Cheney to focus on intelligence scenarios, particularly the possibility that terrorists would obtain nuclear or biological weapons.

Early talks among Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice and their deputies focused on how to weaken Saddam diplomatically. But Wolfowitz proposed seizing Iraq's southern oil fields to build a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Saddam.

Powell dismissed the plan as "lunacy," according to Woodward.

Bush told Woodward he never saw a formal plan for a quick strike. "The idea may have floated around as an interesting nugget to chew on," he said.

As planning proceeded, however, the administration began taking steps Woodward describes as helping to make war inevitable. On Feb. 16, 2002, Bush signed an intelligence finding that directed the CIA to help the military overthrow Saddam and conduct operations within Iraq. At the time, according to "Plan of Attack," the CIA had four informants in Iraq and told Bush it would be impossible to stage a coup. In July, a CIA team entered northern Iraq and began to lay the groundwork for covert action, eventually recruiting 87 informants.

In summer 2002, Bush approved $700 million worth of "preparatory tasks" in the Persian Gulf region, such as upgrading airfields, bases, fuel pipelines and munitions storage depots to accommodate a massive U.S. troop deployment. The Bush administration funded the projects from a supplemental appropriations bill for the war in Afghanistan and old appropriations, keeping Congress unaware of the reprogramming of money and the eventual cost.

"Some people are going to look at that document called the Constitution, which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress," Woodward says in his "60 Minutes" interview, according to the Los Angeles Times.

After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq, Bush became increasingly impatient with their effectiveness. Soon after New Year's 2003, he told Rice at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, "We're not winning. Time is not on our side here. Probably going to have to, we're going to have to go to war."

Bush in the next 10 days also made his decision known to adviser Karl Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar feared Saudi interests would be damaged if Bush did not follow through on attacking Saddam and became another advocate for war.

According to Woodward, Bush asked Rice and communications adviser Karen Hughes whether he should attack Iraq, but he did not specifically ask Powell or Rumsfeld. "I could tell what they thought," Bush said.

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