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2004-04-22 - 10:55 a.m.

Missed Message from Father to Son

"Trying to eliminate Saddam would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. There was no viable exit strategy we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

This quote, from President G.H.W. Bush, in his memoirs, clearly states the incalculable human and political costs that his son, G.W. Bush, has now foisted on us all. As the author of this commentary states:

"My brothers and sisters, it is just too darn bad his son can't read!"

Go here to read the complete commentary by Dr. Robert Bowman, USAF Ret., titled, Some Dare Call It Treason: Wake Up America! in the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinal.

Another excerpt follows:

Here is the truth that we proclaim. This war has nothing to do with national security or freedom or democracy or human rights or protecting our allies or weapons of mass destruction or defeating terrorism or disarming Iraq. It has to do with money. It has to do with oil. And it has to do with raw imperial power. It is based on a pack of lies. And it is wrong. Those who forced this war on an unwilling world are guilty of flagrantly violating the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and international law. What they have done is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and TREASON.

2004-04-20 - 5:25 p.m.

Cheney Was Unwavering in Desire to Go to War:

Tension Between Vice President and Powell Grew Deeper as Both Tried to Guide Bush's Decision

By Bob Woodward

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 20, 2004; Page A01

This is the third of five articles adapted from "Plan of Attack," a book by Bob Woodward that is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President Bush decided to go to war against Iraq. Simon & Schuster. © 2004.

Here is an excerpt from Bob Woodward's new book, which shows that Cheney was the force behind the misguided war in Iraq.

Here are some excerpts from this excerpt. First a little premature gloating:

On April 10, 2003, Ken Adelman, a Reagan administration official and supporter of the Iraq war, published an op-ed article in The Washington Post headlined, " 'Cakewalk' Revisited," more or less gloating over what appeared to be the quick victory there, and reminding readers that 14 months earlier he had written that war would be a "cakewalk." He chastised those who had predicted disaster. "Taking first prize among the many frightful forecasters" was Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser in the first Bush administration. Adelman wrote that his own confidence came from having worked for Donald H. Rumsfeld three times and "from knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz for so many years."

...

After Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney said, the president understood what had to be done. He had to do Afghanistan first, sequence the attacks, but after Afghanistan -- "soon thereafter" -- the president knew he had to do Iraq. Cheney said he was confident after Sept. 11 that it would come out okay.

...

Powell's notes filled three or four pages. War could destabilize friendly governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, he said. It could divert energy from almost everything else, not just the war on terrorism, and dramatically affect the supply and price of oil. What of the image of an American general running an Arab country, a Gen. MacArthur in Baghdad? Powell asked. How long would it be? No one could know. How would success be defined? War would take down Hussein, and "you will become the government until you get a new government."

By the time they were in Bush's office, Powell was on a roll.

"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," he told the president. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all." Privately, Powell and Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.

"It's going to suck the oxygen out of everything," the secretary continued. So as not to sidestep the politics of it, he added, "This will become the first term." The clear implication was: Did the president want to be defined this way? Did he want to run for reelection on an Iraq war?

Powell thought he was scoring. Iraq has a history that is quite complex, he said. The Iraqis have never had a democracy. "So you need to understand that this is not going to be a walk in the woods."

The president listened and asked some questions but did not push back that much. Finally he looked at Powell. "What should I do? What else can I do?"

Powell realized he needed to offer a solution. "You can still make a pitch for a coalition or U.N. action to do what needs to be done," he said. The United Nations was only one way, but some way had to be found to recruit allies, to internationalize the problem.

...

Trouble is what Cheney had in mind.

"Cheney Says Peril of a Nuclear Iraq Justifies Attack," read the headline in the New York Times on Aug. 27. Powell was dumbfounded. The vice president had delivered a hard-line address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville and basically called weapons inspections futile. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions," Cheney had said of Hussein. "On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.' "

The vice president also issued his own personal National Intelligence Estimate of Hussein: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." Ten days earlier, the president himself had said only that Hussein "desires" these weapons. Neither Bush nor the CIA had made any assertion comparable to Cheney's.

Cheney also said that these weapons in the hands of a "murderous dictator" are "as great a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action."

These remarks, just short of a declaration of war, were widely interpreted as administration policy. Powell was astonished. It was a preemptive attack on what the president had agreed to 10 days earlier. Cheney's speech blew it all up. Now Powell felt boxed in. To add to his problem, the BBC started releasing excerpts of an interview Powell had given before Cheney's speech, asserting, "The president has been clear that he believes weapons inspectors should return."

...

Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Hussein. It was as if nothing else existed. Powell attempted to summarize the consequences of unilateral action, an argument he felt he had down pretty well. He added a new dimension, saying that the international reaction would be so negative that he would have to close U.S. embassies around the world if we went to war alone.

That is not the issue, Cheney said. Hussein and the clear threat are the issue.

Maybe it would not turn out as the vice president thinks, Powell said. War could trigger all kinds of unanticipated and unintended consequences -- some that none of them, he included, had imagined.

Not the issue, Cheney said.

...

Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Hussein and Sept. 11. It was a separate little government that was out there -- Wolfowitz, Libby, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and Feith's "Gestapo office," as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. 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. Cheney would take an intercept and say it shows something was happening. No, no, no, Powell or another would say, it shows that somebody talked to somebody else who said something might be happening. A conversation would suggest something might be happening, and Cheney would convert that into a "We know." Well, Powell concluded, we didn't know. No one knew.

...

There's much more of this excerpt. This is just a few choice paragraphs from one long section. Go here to read the rest of the third installment.

Go here to read the first installment.

Go here to read the second installment.

Go here to read the fourth installment.

Go here to read the fifth installment.

2004-04-17 - 3:25 p.m.

Watch 60 Minutes on Sunday, about Bob Woodward's new book, 'Plan of Attack'

In what could be another bombshell for exposing the Bush Administration, Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes, will interview investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who has written another big book on the Bush Administration's march to war in Iraq, "Plan of Attack."

Here are some excerpts from the CBS website:

Woodward's account indicates some members of the administration, particularly Vice President Cheney, were focused on Saddam Hussein from the outset of Mr. Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al Qaeda the top priority.

The Woodward book is packed with previously secret stories out of the mouths of Mr. Bush and his top aides on the year preceding the president's final decision to go to war against Saddam.

It will be available in bookstores next week.

The book says Mr. Bush quietly ordered creation of a war plan against Iraq in the meeting with Rumsfeld while overseeing a divided national security team, including a vice president determined to link Saddam to al Qaeda.

Woodward says Secretary of State Colin Powell believed Cheney developed - as Woodward puts it - an "unhealthy fixation" on trying to find a connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mr. Bush dismissed such characterizations of Cheney.

Mr. Bush told 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 an interview with the author, Mr. Bush said he feared that if news had gotten out about the Iraq plan as America 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," Mr. 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."

...

"Powell thought Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. ... Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."

On the war's origins, the book describes Mr. Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Mr. Bush ordered a fresh one.

The book says Mr. Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.

Even Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Mr. Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was 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 in the midst of fighting another conflict.

Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the book, but Congress was kept in the dark about it.

About that, Woodward told Mike Wallace in the 60 Minutes interview, "(At) the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done.

"They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. ... Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."

This and more Sunday on 60 Minutes on CBS at 7 PM.

2004-04-04 - 12:22 p.m.

Playing Into Their Hands: Our "war" on terror breeds terrorists, and a vicious cycle of violence

We need more and more analysis like this in the mainstream media to educate the voting public about the true consequences of our misguided invasion of Iraq, while we play into the hands of terrorists. In this article by George Soros in the LA Times, he explores the true costs.

Some excerpts follow:

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

If the administration cannot recognize and admit its mistakes, it cannot correct its policies.

War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism. The metaphor suited the purposes of the administration because it invoked our military might. But military actions require an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result, the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states like Afghanistan that are harboring terrorists, not at pursuing the terrorists themselves.

...

On Sept. 11, the United States was the victim of a heinous crime, and the whole world expressed spontaneous and genuine sympathy. Since then, though we Americans are loath to admit it, the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than were lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The comparison is rarely made in the U.S.: American lives are valued differently from the lives of foreigners, but the distinction is less obvious to people abroad.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush administration is more likely to bring about a permanent state of war than an end to terrorism. Terrorists are invisible; therefore, they will never disappear. They will continue to provide a convenient pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy by military means. That, in turn, will continue to generate resistance, setting up a vicious circle of escalating violence.

The important thing to remember about terrorism is that it is a reflexive phenomenon. Its impact and development depend on the actions and reactions of the victims. If the victims react by turning into perpetrators, terrorism triumphs in the sense of engendering more and more violence. That is what the fanatically militant Islamists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks must have hoped to achieve. By allowing a "war" on terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing straight into the terrorists' hands: They — not we — are setting our priorities.

...

By using the war on terror as a pretext for asserting our military supremacy, we are embarking on an escalating spiral of terrorist/ counterterrorist violence. If instead we were to set an example of cooperative behavior, we could not only alleviate poverty, misery and injustice in the world, but also gain support for defending ourselves against terrorism. We will be the greatest beneficiaries if we do so.

Go here to read the whole thoughtful piece.

For a previous article by George Soros, go here.

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