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"Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong; they are the ones to attain felicity".
(surah Al-Imran,ayat-104)
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Books of The Times
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In Bob Woodward's highly anticipated new book, "State of Denial," President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It's a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in "Bush at War," his 2002 book, which depicted the president "” in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed "” as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the "vision thing" his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.
As this new book's title indicates, Mr. Woodward now sees Mr. Bush as a president who lives in a state of willful denial about the worsening situation in Iraq, a president who insists he won't withdraw troops, even "if Laura and Barney are the only ones who support me." (Barney is Mr. Bush's Scottish terrier.) Mr. Woodward draws an equally scathing portrait of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who comes off as a bully and control freak who is reluctant to assume responsibility for his department's failures, and who has surrounded himself with yes men and created a system that bleached out "strong, forceful military advice." Mr. Rumsfeld remains wedded to his plan to conduct the war in Iraq with a lighter, faster force (reflecting his idée fixe of "transforming" the military), even as the situation there continues to deteriorate.
Mr. Woodward reports that after the 2004 election Andrew H. Card Jr., then White House chief of staff, pressed for Mr. Rumsfeld's ouster (he recommended former Secretary of State James A. Baker III as a replacement) , and that Laura Bush shared his concern, worrying that Mr. Rumsfeld was hurting her husband's reputation. Vice President Dick Cheney, however, persuaded Mr. Bush to stay the course with Mr. Cheney's old friend Mr. Rumsfeld, arguing that any change might be perceived as an _expression of doubt and hesitation on the war. Other members of the administration also come off poorly. Gen. Richard B. Myers is depicted as a weak chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who routinely capitulated to the will of Mr. Rumsfeld and who rarely offered an independent opinion. Former C.I.A. director George J. Tenet is described as believing that the war against Iraq was a terrible mistake, but never expressing his feelings to the president. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who appears in this volume primarily in her former role as national security adviser) is depicted as a presidential enabler, ineffectual at her job of coordinating interagency strategy and planning.
For instance, Mr. Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice to warn her of mounting intelligence about an impending terrorist attack, but came away feeling they'd been given "the brush-off" "” a revealing encounter, given Ms. Rice's recent comments, rebutting former President Bill Clinton's allegations that the Bush administration had failed to pursue counterterrorism measures aggressively before 9/11.
As depicted by Mr. Woodward, this is an administration in which virtually no one will speak truth to power, an administration in which the traditional policy-making process involving methodical analysis and debate is routinely subverted. He notes that experts "” who recommended higher troop levels in Iraq, warned about the consequences of disbanding the Iraqi Army or worried about the lack of postwar planning"” were continually ignored by the White House and Pentagon leadership, or themselves failed, out of cowardice or blind loyalty, to press insistently their case for an altered course in the war.
Mr. Woodward describes the administration' s management of the war as being improvisatory and ad hoc, like a pickup basketball game, and argues that it continually tried to give the public a rosy picture of the war in Iraq (while accusing the press of accentuating the negative), even as its own intelligence was pointing to a rising number of attacks against American forces and an upward spiral of violence. A secret February 2005 report by Philip D. Zelikow, a State Department counselor, found that "Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change" and concluded that the American effort there suffered because it lacked a comprehensive, unified policy.
Startlingly little of this overall picture is new, of course. Mr. Woodward's portrait of Mr. Bush as a prisoner of his own certitude owes a serious debt to a 2004 article in The New York Times Magazine by the veteran reporter Ron Suskind, just as his portrait of the Pentagon's incompetent management of the war and occupation owes a serious debt to "Fiasco," the Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks's devastating account of the war, published this summer. Other disclosures recapitulate information contained in books and articles by other journalists and former administration insiders.
But if much of "State of Denial" simply ratifies the larger outline of the Bush administration' s bungled handling of the war as laid out by other reporters, Mr. Woodward does flesh out that narrative with new illustrations and some telling details that enrich the reader's understanding of the inner workings of this administration at this critical moment.
He reports, for instance, that the Vietnam-era Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger "had a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration," urging President Bush and Vice President Cheney to stick it out. According to Mr. Woodward, Mr. Kissinger gave the former Bush adviser and speechwriter Michael Gerson his so-called 1969 salted peanut memo, which warned President Richard M. Nixon that "withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded."
As with Mr. Woodward's earlier books, many of his interviews were conducted on background, though, from the point of view of particular passages, it's often easy for the reader to figure out just who his sources were. In some cases he recreates conversations seemingly based on interviews with only one of the participants. The former Saudi Arabian ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Mr. Card, Mr. Tenet, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser (to Bush senior), appear to be among the author's primary sources.
Whereas Mr. Woodward has tended in the past to stand apart from his narrative, rarely pausing to analyze or assess the copious material he has gathered, he is more of an active agent in this volume "” perhaps in a kind of belated mea culpa for his earlier positive portrayals of the administration. In particular, he inserts himself into interviews with Mr. Rumsfeld "” clearly annoyed, even appalled, by the Pentagon chief's cavalier language and reluctance to assume responsibility for his department's failures.
Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they're now "categorizing more things as attacks." Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, "A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you've got a whole fruit bowl of different things "” a banana and an apple and an orange."
Mr. Woodward adds: "I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a "˜fruit bowl,' a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.'s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes."
Earlier in the volume, in a section describing the former Iraq administrator Jay Garner's reluctance to tell the president about the mistakes he saw the Pentagon making in Iraq, Mr. Woodward writes: "It was only one example of a visitor to the Oval Office not telling the president the whole story or the truth. Likewise, in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court, with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good news and a good time had by all." Were the war in Iraq not a real war that has resulted in more than 2,700 American military casualties and more than 56,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the picture of the Bush administration that emerges from this book might resemble a farce. It's like something out of "The Daily Show" or a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, with Freudian Bush family dramas and high-school- like rivalries between cabinet members who refuse to look at one another at meetings being played out on the world stage.
There's the president, who once said, "I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy," deciding that he's going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy. There's his father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush (who went to war against the same country a decade ago), worrying about the wisdom of another war but reluctant to offer his opinions to his son because he believes in the principle of "let him be himself." There's the president's national security adviser whining to him that the defense secretary won't return her phone calls. And there's the president and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, trading fart jokes.
Mr. Woodward suggests that Mr. Rumsfeld decided to make the Iraq war plan "his personal project" after seeing a rival agency, the C.I.A., step up to run operations in Afghanistan (when it became clear that the Pentagon was unprepared for a quick invasion of that country, right after 9/11). And he suggests that President Bush chose Mr. Rumsfeld as his defense secretary, in part, because he knew his father mistrusted Mr. Rumsfeld, and the younger Bush wanted to prove his father wrong.
Many of the people in this book seem not only dismayed but also flummoxed by some of President Bush's decisions. Mr. Woodward quotes Laura Bush as telling Andrew Card that she doesn't understand why her husband isn't upset about Mr. Rumsfeld and the uproar over his handling of the war . And he quotes Mr. Armitage as telling former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he's baffled by President Bush's reluctance to make adjustments in his conduct of the war.
"Has he thought this through?" Mr. Armitage asks. "What the president says in effect is, We've got to press on in honor of the memory of those who have fallen. Another way to say that is we've got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen."
 Reply:   Bush in 'State of Denial': Woo
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The assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse," said Woodward
Islamonline. net & News Agencies 
 
"The assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse," said Woodward. 
WASHINGTON "” Hemmed in by his ideological rigidities, George W. Bush stands obstinately behind his claims that the state in Iraq is going for the better despite the increasing number of attacks against US troops, says a new book by famed American writer Bob Woodward.
"The assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon (saying) 'Oh, no, things are going to get better,'" Woodward told CBS "60 Minutes" program in an interview taped for broadcast on Sunday in advance of the release of his new book "State of Denial," Reuters reported Friday, September 29.
Woodward, who helped a key role in exposing the Watergate scandal that forced former President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974, said attacks against US-led forces in Iraq occurred, on average, every 15 minutes.
"It's getting to the point now where there are eight, 900 attacks a week. That's more than a hundred a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces," said Woodward, a veteran Washington Post reporter.
Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 on the grounds that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
A recent US presidential report revealed that the United States was "dead wrong" on Iraq's alleged WMDs and its officials made the case for invading the oil-rich country despite intelligence doubts and strong voices of dissent.
Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell regretted his UN statement making the case for the US-led Iraq invasion, saying it was a "blot" on his record.
Adamancy
According to Woodward, Bush was absolutely certain he was on the right course on Iraq. 
According to Woodward, Bush was absolutely certain he was on the right course on Iraq, dismissing as too pessimistic assessments from American commanders and others about the situation there, The New York Times reported Saturday.
"I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me," the book quoted Bush, referring to his wife and Scottish terrier, in a meeting with key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq.
 The book also says that the White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell "insurgency" in Iraq.
"I don't want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don't think we are there yet," the book quoted Bush as saying in November 2003.
In the weeks before the Iraq war began, the book recounts, President Bush's parents did not also share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts.
Former President George H. W. Bush, "is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he's up at night worried," the book quoted Mrs Barbar Bush as saying.
The book is the third that Woodward has written chronicling the inner debates in the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.
Woodward's book is based on interviews with Bush's national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq.
Some of those interviewed, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are identified by name, but neither Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says.
Division
The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war.
It says President Bush's top advisers were often at odds among themselves, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms.
The book, for instance, describes a deep fissure between Powell and Rumsfeld.
When Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that "if I go, Don should go," referring to Rumsfeld.
Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
American commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, is also reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the fall of 2005 that "Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore" to make a public case for the American strategy for victory in Iraq.
A cohort of American experts had told The New York Times that the Bush administration' s Iraq strategy has failed and needs to be changed.
The Washington Post reported in July that many American soldiers were growing increasingly disillusioned about the Iraq war and their ability to succeed against an elusive enemy.
The unpopularity of the Iraq war has many Republicans nervous about the party's chances in the November midterm elections in which Democrats are seeking to retake control of the US House of Representatives and the Senate.
 

 
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