Recriminations

...When Bush met with some Iraqi dissidents he told them that "my job is to rally the world and win the war...I truly believe out of this will come peace between Israel and the Palestinians...

...He wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that said, "There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks...there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time...

...Thus even before Bush was inaugurated, Woodward writes, Cheney was in touch with the outgoing secretary of defense, William Cohen...

...The meeting continued through dinner in the family dining room, and then moved on to the president's office...

...Bu Woodward did have "access," as they say, to the pres John Corry is a senior editor of The America] Spectator...

...He also tells Woodward that he never discussed Iraq with his father...

...military personnel under a two-star general worked months and spent millions on a goofy plan to train Iraqi exiles in Hungary, but only 70 exiles were trained...

...He would say, "There are no war plans on my desk" Woodward says Powell had decided by then that he had to have some private time with Bush, away from Cheney and Rumsfeld and all the Pentagon planners: He would acquaint him with his views on the consequences of war...

...You'll own it all...

...Bush, in his way, remains a mystery...

...Explorations of neocon thinking can touch on Israel, and this becomes tricky It is easier to ignore the idea that regime change in Iraq would bring peace to Israel than to be thought a crank or an anti-Semite...

...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 ident and all his men, and Plan of Attack is a respectable piece of reporting...

...The planning for war took on a life of its own, and the invasion became inevitable...

...or, Dick Chene: pushed him into it, while Condi commiser ated, and Rummy stayed inscrutable Meanwhile George Tenet was an enthusiast although Colin Powell had reservations...

...But there are none, unless you think the revelation that almost everyone in Washington uses the f-word is scandalous...

...If there is a scandal, however, it lies in the revelation that a major policy decision was not necessarily the product of informed thinking, sober judgment, and rational behavior...

...There should be a serious "discussion about Iraq and different options...

...The U.S...

...The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam...

...Woodward uses it, too...

...Rice called Powell the next day, and told him the meeting had been "terrific," and that they should have more meetings like that...

...Woodward might have explored this, along with much of the rest of neoconservative thinking, but he doesn't...

...Guided by prayer and b: instinct, he made the fateful decision to invade Iraq on his own...

...We really need to get the president-elect briefed up on some things," Cheney told him...

...Woodward says he interviewed some 75 key participants in the Iraqi decisions, and that when he attributes "thoughts, judgments or feelings" to any of them he is relying on what he was told by "the person directly, a colleague with firsthand knowledge or the written record...

...Cheney, however, would have none of that, and in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars he virtually declared war on his own, stating flatly that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he intended to use them against us...

...Establishment figures like Woodward try not to go there, and in Plan of Attack the giddy neocon influence is mentioned only in passing...

...should retaliate against Saddam Hussein as well as Osama bin Laden...

...Tommy Franks says Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense, and a Rumsfeld favorite, is the "f--ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth...

...But other than this, Woodward does not much intrude into the narrative, and he does not often give us the silly interior monologues in which he presumes to tell us what some one is thinking...

...For one thing, Bush was to speak at the U.N...

...Meanwhile it should be noted that Plan of Attack is strewn with stray pieces of information that have little to do with high policy, but are peculiarly informative...

...You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," he told the president...

...He believed "it was necessary and it would be relatively easy...

...He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War...

...Powell argued for a diplomatic approach...

...It is not surprising that Powell is presented as the sanest member of the administration, soldiering on prudently while those around him keep losing their heads...

...And by then, Woodward writes, "Powell was on a roll...

...Tommy Franks told his commanders to come up with new plans for a quicker, more efficient war...

...He is keen and decisive...

...Colin Powell has more thoughts, judgments, and feelings attributed to him than anyone else, and clearly he is one of Woodward's very best sources...

...Dick Cheney worries him most...

...Indeed Bob Woodward wonders, too...

...He told Bush the invasion would have unforeseen consequences, but he wondered if Bush understood...

...in September, but his advisers disagreed on what he should say...

...Plan ofAttack is hardly the final word on the runup to war, and historians will one day do something more substantial...

...Woodward is not a stylish write] and Plan of Attack is sometimes plain boring...

...Cheney, and Rumsfeld to some degree, wanted toughness...

...He tells Woodward he never asked Powell or Rumsfeld whether he should go to war, but that he did ask Rice and Karen Hughes...

...A year later, Bush would refer to that time as "the miserable month of August...

...They met at the White House on the evening of August 5. Condoleezza Rice was there, too...

...Karl Rove, a Norwegian-American, distrusts Hans Blix because he is Swedish...

...Some 800 U.S...

...At the same time Brent Scowcroft, who had been the national security adviser to Bush's father, was growing alarmed...

...It was as if nothing else existed...

...You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems...

...In Washington, all that faux machismo is catching...

...Y THE SUMMER OF 2002, the discussions about B Iraq focused increasingly on plans for an invasion...

...Meanwhile early publicity, skillfully orchestrated, suggested there were scandalous revelations in Plan of Attack...

...he i feckless and dim...

...And that day, too, Bush left for Crawford, Texas, and nearly a month-long vacation...

...Symbolically, and perhaps literally, the administration was coming apart...

...But also that day, Woodward notes, Gen...

...He also asked an aide to talk to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, about an Iraqi "connection" to bin Laden...

...On the afternoon of 9/11, Woodward says, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld speculated on whether the U.S...

...This is lunacy," Powell says when Wolfowitz, "like a drum that would not stop," continues to insist that regime change in Iraq would be a breeze...

...The momentum for war was building, although the president had found a way to more or less deny it...

...Which is about as close as Woodward comes to telling us what he plainly thinks about the president and his decision to go to war: Bush never quite knew what he was doing...

...Whether the Iraq invasion was justified or not, it appears to have come about largely because of old grudges, faulty intelligence, and half-baked surmises...

...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 B IN REVIEW That upset Powell, of course, but there seems to be no record of whether Bush cared very much one way or the other...

...When he interviewed Bush, he writes, "I glimpsed what Powell apparently had seen—uncertainty that the president fully grasped the potential consequences...

...Woodward calls Wolfowitz "the intellectual godBOOKS IN REVIEW father and fiercest advocate for toppling Saddam...

...The planning for war took on a life of its own, and the invasion became inevitable...

...military would establish an enclave in southern Iraq, and then help the anti-Saddam opposition to rally the rest of the country and overthrow the dictator...

...Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney," Woodward writes...

...Powell knows "deeply, intimately, that war is fought by kids, even teenagers who would die," and that "the top echelon of the Bush administration was notably free of those who had seen combat...

...According to Woodward, Cheney thought of Iraq as "topic A." Others in the administration did, too...

...Powell also told Bush, according to Woodward, that "it's nice to say we can do it unilaterally, except you can't...

...This may seem doubtful, but it may also be that Bush, who apparently is never bothered by second thoughts, needs no counsel but his own...

...In fact, the plan was so divorced from the reality on the ground in Iraq that only an intellectual would think it had merit...

...But by then, of course, they will know how it all turned out...