War Without End

Alpha

Subj: Wash Post: Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9-11]
Date: 4/16/04 9:00:34 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: jblankfort@earthlink.net

"Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office -- had established what amounted to a separate government."

washingtonpost.com
Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9/11
Secrecy Was Necessary, President Says

By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page A01

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In 31/2 hours of interviews with Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bush said the secret planning was necessary to avoid "enormous international angst and domestic speculation" and that "war is my absolute last option."

Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration. Vice President Cheney, whom Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force" led that group and had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force.

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 here (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. "I said I'm with you. I mean it," Blair replied.

Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that became so strained Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessively trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact.

Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office -- had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a dinner he hosted a year ago celebrating the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and "always had major reservations about what we were trying to do."

Before the war with Iraq, Powell bluntly told Bush that if he sent U.S. troops there "you're going to be owning this place." Powell and his deputy and closest friend, Richard L. Armitage, used to refer to what they called "the Pottery Barn rule" on Iraq: "You break it, you own it," according to Woodward.

But, when asked personally by the president, Powell agreed to make the U.S. case against Hussein 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 the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.

McLaughlin's version used communications intercepts, satellite photos, diagrams and other intelligence. "Nice try," Bush said when the CIA official 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, throwing his arms in the air. Bush pressed him again. "George, how confident are you?"

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

Tenet later told associates he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad, according to Woodward. After the CIA director made a rare public speech in February defending the CIA's handling of intelligence about Iraq, Bush called him to say he had done "a great job."

In his previous book, "Bush at War," Woodward described the administration's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: its decision to attack the Taliban government in Afghanistan and its increasing focus on Iraq. His new book is a narrative history of how Bush and his administration launched the war on Iraq. It is based on interviews with more than 75 people, including Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq. "Let's get started on this," Bush recalled saying. "And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to." He also asked, Could this be done on a basis that would not be terribly noticeable?

Bush received his first detailed briefing on Iraq war plans five weeks later, on Dec. 28, when Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. Bush told reporters afterward that they had discussed Afghanistan.

While it has been previously reported that Bush directed the Pentagon to begin considering options for an invasion of Iraq immediately after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Bush's order to Rumsfeld began an intensive process in which Franks worked in secret with a small staff, talked almost daily with the defense secretary and met about once a month with Bush.

This week, the president acknowledged that the violent uprising against U.S. troops in Iraq has resulted in "a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people." But he insisted that his course of action in Iraq has been the correct one in language that echoed what he told Woodward more than four months ago.

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, 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, and the powerful role his religious belief played throughout that time.

"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 that "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."

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

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. He said it would be a blueprint of historical significance that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives."

"But the news of this, in my judgment," Bush added, "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 early in 2001 and even after the Sept. 11 attacks that year on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke have made that charge in recently published memoirs.

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

Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Powell dismissed the plan as "lunacy," according to Woodward, and told Bush what he thought. "You don't have to be bullied into this," Powell said.

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.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., according to Woodward, compared Bush to a circus rider with one foot on a "diplomacy" steed and the other on a "war" steed, both heading toward the same destination: regime change in Iraq. When it was clear that diplomacy would not get him to his goal, Card said, Bush let go of that horse and rode the one called war.

But as the planning proceeded, the administration began taking steps that 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 Hussein and conduct operations within Iraq. At the time, according to "Plan of Attack," the CIA had only four informants in Iraq and told Bush that it would be impossible to overthrow Hussein through a coup.

In July, a CIA team entered northern Iraq and began to lay the groundwork for covert action, eventually recruiting an extensive network of 87 Iraqi informants code-named ROCKSTARS who gave the U.S. detailed information on Iraqi forces, including a CD-ROM containing the personnel files of the Iraq Special Security Organization (SSO).

Woodward writes that the CIA essentially became an advocate for war first by asserting that covert action would be ineffective, and later by saying that its new network of spies would be endangered if the United States did not attack Iraq. Another factor in the gathering momentum were the forces the military began shifting to Kuwait, the pre-positioning that was a key component of Franks's planning.

In the summer of 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.

During that summer, Powell and Cheney engaged in some of their sharpest debates. Powell argued that the United States should take its case to the United Nations, which Cheney said was a waste of time. Woodward had described some of that conflict in "Bush at War."

Among Powell's allies was Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush's father, who wrote an op-ed piece against the war for the Wall Street Journal. After it was published in August 2002, Powell thanked Scowcroft for giving him "some running room." But Rice called Scowcroft to tell her former boss that it looked as if he was speaking for Bush's father and that the article was a slap at the incumbent president.

Despite Powell's admonitions to the president, "Plan of Attack" suggests it was Blair who may have played a more critical role in persuading Bush to seek a resolution from the United Nations. At a meeting with the president at Camp David in early September, Blair backed Bush on Iraq but said he needed to show he had tried U.N. diplomacy. Bush agreed, and later referred to the Camp David session with Blair as "the cojones meeting," using a colloquial Spanish term for courage.

After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq, Bush became increasingly impatient with their effectiveness and the role of chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. Shortly after New Year's 2003, he told Rice at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., "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 said much the same thing to White House political adviser Karl Rove, who had gone to Crawford to brief him on plans for his reelection campaign. In the next 10 days, Bush also made his decision known to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, who helped arrange Saudi cooperation with the U.S. military, feared Saudi interests would be damaged if Bush did not follow through on attacking Hussein, and became another advocate for war.

According to "Plan of Attack," Bush asked Rice and his long-time communications adviser, Karen Hughes, whether he should attack Iraq, but he did not specifically ask Powell or Rumsfeld. "I could tell what they thought," the president said. "I didn't need to ask their opinion about Saddam Hussein or how to deal with Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear."

Rumsfeld, whom Woodward interviewed for three hours, is portrayed in the book 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 such as Wolfowitz and Feith were.

Bush told Powell of his decision in a brief meeting in the White House. Evidently concerned about Powell's reaction, he said, "Are you with me on this? I think I have to do this. I want you with me."

"I'll do the best I can," Powell answered. "Yes, sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."

Bush said he did not remember asking the question of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, who fought Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But, he added that the two had discussed developments in Iraq.

"You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said.

Describing what the 41st president said to him about Iraq, the 43rd president told Woodward:

"It was less, 'Here's how you have to take care of the guy [Hussein],' and more, 'I've been through what you've been through and I know what's happening and therefore I love you' would be a more accurate way to describe it."

2004 The Washington Post Company

Alpha

Subj: Biggest bombshell yet! Woodward exposes Bush's LIE!
Date: 4/17/04 12:37:17 AM Pacific Daylight Time

WOODWARD'S NEW BOOK IS A BOMBSHELL: BUSH'S SECRET IRAQ ATTACK

Date: 4/16/04 10:36:08 AM Central Daylight Time
From: Cork Col

In his new book, "Plan of Attack," journalist Bob Woodward states President Bush put in a motion a plan to attack Iraq shortly after we invaded Afghanistan, and 16 months before we attacked Iraq. Condoleeza Rice was NOT notified of the plan. Rumsfeld was ordered to update his plans for attacking Iraq. Former Gen. Tommy Franks opposed the plan. Cheney was the force behind the secret plan to attack Iraq.
Bill Corcoran
Chicago, Illinois
corkcol@aol.com

AP is reporting today (Friday, April 16) the following:

President Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team, says a new book on his Iraq policy. Bush feared that if news got out about the Iraq plan as U.S. forces were fighting another conflict, people would think he was too eager for war, journalist Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," a behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months leading to the Iraq invasion.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in book stores next week.

"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as telling Woodward. "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."

Bush and his aides have denied accusations they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al-Qaida terrorist threat before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A commission investigating the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony from high-ranking government officials. One of them, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, charged the Bush administration's determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.

Woodward's account fleshes out the degree to which some members of the administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were focused on Saddam Hussein from the onset of Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.

Woodward says Bush pulled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld aside Nov. 21, 2001 - when U.S. forces and allies were in control of about half of Afghanistan - and asked him what kind of war plan he had on Iraq. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush told him to get started on a fresh one.

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

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

In an interview two years later, Bush told Woodward that if the news had leaked, it would have caused ''enormous international angst and domestic speculation.''

The Bush administration's drive toward war with Iraq raised an international furor anyway, alienating long-time allies who did not believe the White House had made a sufficient case against Saddam. Saddam was toppled a year ago and taken into custody last December. But the central figure of al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, remains at large and a threat to the west.

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.

Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says Cheney's well-known hawkish attitudes on Iraq were frequently decisive in Bush's decision-making.

Cheney pressed the outgoing Clinton administration to brief Bush on the Iraq threat before he took office, Woodward writes.

In August 2002, when Bush talked publicly of being a patient man who would weigh Iraqi options carefully, the vice president took the administration's Iraq policy on a harder track in a speech declaring the weapons inspections ineffective. Cheney's speech was viewed as the beginning of a campaign to undermine or overthrow Saddam. Woodward said Bush let Cheney make the speech without asking what he would say.

The vice president also figured prominently in a protracted decision March 19, 2003, to strike Iraq before a 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave the country had expired.

When the CIA and its Iraqi sources reported that Saddam's sons and other family members were at a small palace, and Saddam was on his way to join them, Bush's top advisers debated whether to strike ahead of plan.

Franks was against it, saying it was unfair to move before a deadline announced to the other side, the book says. Rumsfeld and Rice favored the early strike, and Secretary of State Colin Powell leaned that way.

But Bush did not make his decision until he had cleared everyone out of the Oval Office except the vice president. ''I think we ought to go for it,'' Cheney is quoted as saying. Bush did.

U.S. forces unleashed bombs and cruise missiles, blanketing the compound but missing the palace. Tenet called the White House before dawn to say the Iraqi leader had been killed. But his optimism was premature. Saddam was alive.

The 468-page book is published by Simon & Schuster. Woodward will be interviewed on CBS' ''60 Minutes'' Sunday night to promote the book.

04/16/04 08:51 EDT

Alpha

Alpha

Israel's Standing as US Ally Questioned

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/israel-s-standing-as-u-s-ally-questioned.php

Alpha

9/11 Commission Director: Iraq War Launched to Protect Israel.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.

IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 – the 9/11 commission – in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East. ....

"And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," said Zelikow.

The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state. ....

... The administration should be blamed for not making known to the public its true intentions and real motives for invading Iraq.

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/mekay.php?articleid=2208

Alpha

Lawmaker now says U.S. should stay in U.N., if only to protect Israel
By Howard Fischer

CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES

PHOENIX - A move by state senators to get the United States out of the United Nations became a resolution to stay there, mainly to protect Israel against its Arab neighbors.
Sen. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, withdrew his proposal Wednesday to ask Congress to yank U.S. membership in the intern...

http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/dailystar/18089.php

Alpha · Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 1:42 pm Post subject: ALL FOR ISRAEL

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/all-for-israel.php

Alpha

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html

Neoconservatives Try to Suggest that Sadr Uprising is “Made in Teheran”

By Jim Lobe
April 9, 2004

Despite the growing number of reports that depict the past week's uprising by the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Mahdi Army as a spontaneous and indigenous revolt, some influential U.S. neoconservatives are insisting that Iran is behind it. They are calling on the Bush administration to warn Teheran to cease its alleged backing for al-Sadr and other Shia militias or face retaliation, ranging from an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities to covert action designed to overthrow the government.

But independent experts on both Iran and Iraq say that, while Iran has no doubt provided various forms of assistance to Shia factions in Iraq since Hussein's ouster one year ago, its relations with Sadr have long been rocky and that it has opposed radical actions that could destabilize the situation. “Those elements closest to Iran among the Shiite clerics (in Iraq) have been the most moderate through all of this,” according to Shaul Bakhash, an Iran expert at George Mason University. Indeed, many regional specialists agree that Iran has a strategic interest in avoiding any train of events that risks plunging Iraq into chaos or civil war and partition.

Neoconservatives centered in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and among the civilian leadership in the Pentagon have strongly opposed any détente with Iran and have frequently blamed it for problems it has encountered in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neoconservatives outside the administration, such as former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht, called even before the Iraq war for Washington to support indigenous efforts to oust the “mullahcracy” in Teheran, which is seen as an arch-enemy of both the U.S. and Israel.

Raising Tensions with Iran
Some neoconservatives have seized on Sadr’s uprising as a new opportunity both to raise tensions against Iran and to divert attention from their own bungling of relations with the Shia community in Iraq.

Top U.S. officials both in the U.S. and in Iraq have not yet named Iran as the hidden hand behind Sadr, although a senior reporter at the right-wing Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough, quoted unnamed “military sources” April 7 th as telling him that Sadr “is being aided directly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard … and by Hezbollah, an Iranian-created terrorist group based in Lebanon.” Unnamed “Pentagon officials” gave a similar account to the New York Times, although the Times reporter, James Risen, stressed that CIA officials disagreed with that analysis, adding: “Some intelligence officials believe that the Pentagon has been eager to link Hezbollah to the violence in Iraq to link the Iranian regime more closely to anti-American terrorism.”

The Iran hand was first raised in connection with Sadr’s revolt by Michael Rubin, who just returned from a stint as a “governance team adviser” for the CPA in Iraq to his previous position as a resident fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In a column published in the Los Angeles Times on April 4 th, he complained that Washington and the CPA had failed to provide liberal and democratic Iraqi leaders with anything like the kind of support that Iran was supplying to radical Shia leaders and their “gangs.”

On a visit to the Shia-dominated south, according to Rubin, he found that Iranians were pouring money and arms to key Islamist parties, including the Da’wa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Sadr himself whose rise over the past year, according to Rubin, is explained by the “ample funding he receives through Iran-based cleric Ayatollah Kazem al Haeri, a close associate of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini.”

Similarly, another senior CPA adviser, Larry Diamond, a neoconservative who specializes in democratization at the California-based Hoover Institution, told IPS this week that Sadr’s Mahdi Army, as well as other Shia militias, are being armed and financed by Iran with the aim of imposing “another Iranian-style theocracy.”

" Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever, lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort for any genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq,” said Diamond. “The longer we wait to confront the thug, the more troops he’ll have in his army, the more arms he’ll have and financial support, virtually all coming from Iran, the more he will intimidate and kill sincere democratic actors in the country, and the more impossible our task at building democracy will become.” He added, “I think we should tell the Iranian regime that if they don't cease and desist, we will play the same game, that we will destabilize them.”

On Tuesday, April 6 th, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page took up the same theme, noting that Sadr has talked “openly of creating an Iranian-style Islamic Republic in Iraq (and) has visited Tehran since the fall of Saddam. … (H)is Mahdi militia is almost certainly financed and trained by Iranians,” the editorial went on, adding, “Revolutionary Guards may be instigating some of the current unrest.”

"As for Teheran, we would hope the Sadr uprising puts to rest the illusion that the mullahs (in Teheran) can be appeased. As Bernard Lewis teaches, Middle Eastern leaders interpret American restraint as weakness. Iran's mullahs fear a Muslim democracy in Iraq because is it a direct threat to their own rule. If warnings to Teheran from Washington don't impress them, perhaps some cruise missiles aimed at the Bushehr nuclear site will concentrate their minds,” the Journal suggested.

On Wednesday, New York Times columnist William Safire asserted the existence of an axis involving Sadr, Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria, as well. “We should break the Iranian-Hezbollah-Sadr connection in ways that our special forces know how to do,” he wrote. “Plenty of Iraqi Shiites, who are Arab, distrust the Persian ayatollahs in Iran and can provide actionable intelligence about a Syrian transmission belt” that presumably is used to infiltrate Hezbollah members into Iraq to link up with the Sadr’s partisans.

A Predictable Conflagration
This line of reasoning, however, appears particularly curious to Bakhash who notes that the Sadr family, including Moqtada himself, is precisely the kind Iraqi Shiite who would be deeply suspicious of Teheran. “Sadr’s father was a strong Iraqi nationalist, like Moqtada himself,” he said. “He often used to question why there were in Iraq ayatollahs who spoke Arabic with a Persian accent.”

Like other experts, Bakhash believes that Iran has indeed been heavily involved with the Iraqi Shia community, but sees the leadership providing far more support to SCIRI and its Badr brigades than to Sadr, who, from Teheran’s point of view, is seen as untrustworthy.

Bakhash also questions the neoconservative assumption that Iran wants to destabilize Iraq at this point. “Obviously the Iranians are not unhappy to see the Americans discomfited in Iraq, but I don’t think it’s the policy of the Iranian government to destabilize Iraq right along its own border,” he said.

Middle East historian Juan Cole of the University of Michigan also questions the notion of a link between Iran and Sadr in the current uprising. While Sadr’s views on theocratic government are consistent with those of Iranian hardliners, according to Cole, his outspoken Iraqi nationalism poses a major challenge to Khameini’s claim to authority over all Shiite religious communities, including those outside Iran. Contrary to the Journal’s assumptions, according to Cole, Sadr did not receive much encouragement from the Iranians leaders with whom he met in Teheran. “The message he got … was that he should top being so divisive and should cooperate more with the other Shiite leaders.”

Geoffrey Kemp, an Iran specialist at the Nixon Center and Middle East adviser on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, says he has little doubt that the Iranians have influence with several different Shiite groups and that there may even be “rogue elements” inside Iran who back Sadr. But he agrees that Teheran’s strongest ties are with SCIRI and the Badr Brigades, who were trained by the Revolutionary Guard inside Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule. “Iran has a huge strategic stake in what happens in Iraq, but I don’t think it is trying to provoke a direct confrontation (with the U.S.) at this time,” he said. “The situation is far too complex to make simplistic statements about what Iran is or is not doing,” Kemp said, “But to suggest that this is an Iranian-inspired insurrection is a stretch.”

“The neoconservatives are all so heavily invested in the success of Iraq that, instead of blaming the Pentagon for some extraordinary blunders, they want to blame everyone else--the State Department, the Iranians, the Syrians for the mess that was partly of their own making,” according to Kemp.

Cole, in fact, has raised questions about how some of those blunders--including the CPA’s decision to close Sadr’s newspaper--came to be committed, suggesting that some neoconservatives in the CPA may themselves have been pushing for a crisis for “all sorts of ulterior motives,” such as moving Iraq closer to partition--a move that would could also lead to the destabilization of Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Cole noted that Sadr’s expression of solidarity with Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas whose spiritual and political leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated in an Israeli rocket attack late last month, may have moved the CPA to provoke a confrontation. The following day, Sadr’s top aide and 13 of his followers were suddenly arrested on a six-month-old warrant, touching off the insurrection. “Who provoked (the arrests) and why?” asked Cole, who adds that the conflagration that followed was entirely predictable.

(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)

Alpha

Bush Says He Can't Think of Any Mistakes
Helen Thomas

President Bush told his news conference that he couldn't think of any mistakes he has made since he was inaugurated.

The president appeared totally flummoxed when asked to name one. He hemmed and hawed and aw-shucked, suggested that such a question was better left to historians. He complained about being asked such a question "in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer."

He then veered toward humility. "I don't want to sound like I've made no mistakes. I'm confident I have." But he said he just wasn't "as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Well, let me try to help. Let's start with his invasion of Iraq.

That Bush mistake is one we will be paying for indefinitely, both in the human cost -- not to mention the diplomatic and financial price ($121 billion so far).

The mistake was the false premise underlying the U.S. invasion, a trumped-up claim that Bush insisted on repeating Tuesday night when he claimed that Saddam Hussein was "a threat to the region, he was a threat to the United States." And he had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent danger to us.

"Of course I want to know why we haven't found a weapon yet," he told reporters after a year-long search has turned up no evidence of such weapons. "But I still know Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people."

As for the weapons, the president said wistfully: "They could still be there."

The president has a large taxpayer-financed staff that is supposed to prepare him for likely questions he would face at a news conference. But either Bush or the staff flubbed a question that every reporter in Washington could have predicted: Would he apologize for the government failures that led to the Sept. 11 attacks?

The question was a natural because Richard Clarke, his former counter-terrorism director, had offered such an apology last month.

But don't expect one from the president. He wasn't responsible for 9-11 -- Osama bin Laden was, Bush replied.

Meanwhile, the American casualty toll continues to mount in Iraq and is beginning to get the attention of the American people.

And though he rejects the analogy, the U.S. involvement in Iraq is starting to look like the Vietnam quagmire.

Asked about any parallel with Vietnam, Bush dismissed such a comparison, saying it would send the wrong message to the troops and the wrong message to the enemy. That sure reminds me of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

Even more reminiscent was Bush's constant refrain: "We are going to stay the course." It was 1967 and 1970 all over again.

Bush wants us to forget the promises that his administration made before the war that happy Iraqis would welcome the U.S. military invaders as liberators.

And he shamelessly continues his faltering effort to depict the invasion of Iraq as somehow connected to the war on terrorism. In doing so, Bush is trying to get off the hook for failing to keep his eye on the ball, which would have been to focus on the fight in Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Iraq -- which should have been a sideshow -- has dominated his radar screen since he became president.

Both Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have attested to Bush's determination to get rid of Saddam Hussein from day one. It was a policy in search of justification. And his ongoing attempts to connect the 9-11 tragedy with Saddam Hussein would be laughable if they weren't so blatantly dishonest.

Bush acknowledges he faces tough times and that he plans to send more troops to Iraq and they will be there for an indefinite period, probably long after the United States returns sovereignty to the Iraqi people on June 30.

Maybe after June, the president will find time to ponder whether he has made any mistakes.

Copyright Hearst Newspapers 2004 All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced.

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/3010576/detail.html

(Helen Thomas can be reached via e-mail: hthomas@hearstdc.com.

Hamas' Rantisi Assassinated (this is the kind of thing which greatly contributes to our terror problem):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/04/17/hamas-rantisi-assassinated.php

Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/02/29/neo-cons-israel-and-the-bush-administration.php

Alpha

Subj: The Big Lie: Bush's plan to drag U.S. into war
Date: 4/17/04 11:10:14 AM Pacific Daylight Time
From: LAdams

EXPLOSIVE DETAILS IN WOODWARD BOOK SHOW BUSH OBSESSED WITH IRAQ
Date: 4/17/04 5:53:36 AM Central Daylight Time
From: Cork Col

In the first installment of Bob Woodward's explosive book, "Plan of Attack," the veteran journalist uses three-and-one-half hours of an interview with President Bush to show a President who was obsessed with going to war with Iraq, even as diplomatic relations were going on with the UN in what best can be described as a dog 'n pony show by the Bush administration. The book also paints Vice President Cheney as the "steamroller" who was the prime motivating force behind Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, and how Cheney and Sec. of State Colin Powell clashed over the Iraq attack plan and to this day do not speak to each other. It is also clear from reading the first installment that National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was "out of the loop" and was virtually kept in the dark as plans to invade Iraq were being made behind closed doors in the White House. What is also abundantly clear is both former Treasury Sec. Paul O'Neill and former counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke were 100% right in their statements in their own books that Bush was bound and determined to go to war with Iraq, and was looking for some way Saddam Hussein could be linked to 9/11. However, the most chilling part of the initial installment is when President Bush talks about receiving advice from his father, and he dismisses the advice from his father by stating he felt compelled to go to war with Iraq because God has told him to do it.

Bill Corcoran
Chicago, Illinois
corkcol@aol.com

===================================

washingtonpost.com
Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9/11
Book Says President Called Secrecy Vital
By William Hamilton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 17, 2004; Page A01

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

In 31/2 hours of interviews with Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post, Bush said that the secret planning was necessary to avoid "enormous international angst and domestic speculation" and that "war is my absolute last option."

Adding to the momentum, Woodward writes, was the pressure from advocates of war inside the administration. Vice President Cheney, whom Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force," led that group and had developed what some of his colleagues felt was a "fever" about removing Hussein by force.

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 here (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. "I said I'm with you. I mean it," Blair replied.

Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that became so strained Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessively trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact.

Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's "Gestapo" office -- had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a dinner he hosted a year ago celebrating the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and "always had major reservations about what we were trying to do."

Before the war with Iraq, Powell bluntly told Bush that if he sent U.S. troops there "you're going to be owning this place." Powell and his deputy and closest friend, Richard L. Armitage, used to refer to what they called "the Pottery Barn rule" on Iraq: "You break it, you own it," according to Woodward.

But, when asked personally by the president, Powell agreed to make the U.S. case against Hussein 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 the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin at a White House meeting on Dec. 21, 2002.

McLaughlin's version used communications intercepts, satellite photos, diagrams and other intelligence. "Nice try," Bush said when the CIA official 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, throwing his arms in the air. Bush pressed him again. "George, how confident are you?"

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

Tenet later told associates he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad, according to Woodward. After the CIA director made a rare public speech in February defending the CIA's handling of intelligence about Iraq, Bush called him to say he had done "a great job."

In his previous book, "Bush at War," Woodward described the administration's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: its decision to attack the Taliban government in Afghanistan and its increasing focus on Iraq. His new book is a narrative history of how Bush and his administration launched the war on Iraq. It is based on interviews with more than 75 people, including Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

On Nov. 21, 2001, 72 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush directed Rumsfeld to begin planning for war with Iraq. "Let's get started on this," Bush recalled saying. "And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to." He also asked: Could this be done on a basis that would not be terribly noticeable?

Bush received his first detailed briefing on Iraq war plans five weeks later, on Dec. 28, when Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, visited Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Tex. Bush told reporters afterward that they had discussed Afghanistan.

While it has been previously reported that Bush directed the Pentagon to begin considering options for an invasion of Iraq immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's order to Rumsfeld began an intensive process in which Franks worked in secret with a small staff, talked almost daily with the defense secretary and met about once a month with Bush.

This week, the president acknowledged that the violent uprising against U.S. troops in Iraq has resulted in "a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people." But he insisted that his course of action in Iraq has been the correct one in language that echoed what he told Woodward more than four months ago.

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, 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, and the powerful role his religious beliefs played throughout that time.

"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."

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."

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. He said it would be a blueprint of historical significance that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives."

"But the news of this, in my judgment," Bush added, "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 early in 2001 and even after the Sept. 11 attacks. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill and former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke have made that charge in recently published memoirs.

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

Early discussions among the administration's national security "principals" -- Cheney, Powell, Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and their deputies focused on how to weaken Hussein diplomatically. But Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz proposed sending in the military to seize Iraq's southern oil fields and establish the area as a foothold from which opposition groups could overthrow Hussein.

Powell dismissed the plan as "lunacy," according to Woodward, and told Bush what he thought. "You don't have to be bullied into this," Powell said.

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.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., according to Woodward, compared Bush to a circus rider with one foot on a "diplomacy" steed and the other on a "war" steed, both heading toward the same destination: regime change in Iraq. When it was clear that diplomacy would not get him to his goal, Card said, Bush let go of that horse and rode the one called war.

But as the planning proceeded, the administration began taking steps that 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 Hussein and conduct operations within Iraq. At the time, according to "Plan of Attack," the CIA had only four informants in Iraq and told Bush that it would be impossible to overthrow Hussein through a coup.

In July, a CIA team entered northern Iraq and began to lay the groundwork for covert action, eventually recruiting an extensive network of 87 Iraqi informants code-named ROCKSTARS who gave the U.S. detailed information on Iraqi forces, including a CD-ROM containing the personnel files of the Iraq Special Security Organization (SSO).
Woodward writes that the CIA essentially became an advocate for war first by asserting that covert action would be ineffective, and later by saying that its new network of spies would be endangered if the United States did not attack Iraq. Another factor in the gathering momentum were the forces the military began shifting to Kuwait, the pre-positioning that was a key component of Franks's planning.

In the summer of 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.

During that summer, Powell and Cheney engaged in some of their sharpest debates. Powell argued that the United States should take its case to the United Nations, which Cheney said was a waste of time. Woodward had described some of that conflict in "Bush at War."

Among Powell's allies was Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush's father, who wrote an op-ed piece against the war for the Wall Street Journal. After it was published in August 2002, Powell thanked Scowcroft for giving him "some running room." But Rice called Scowcroft to tell her former boss that it looked as if he was speaking for Bush's father and that the article was a slap at the incumbent president.

Despite Powell's admonitions to the president, "Plan of Attack" suggests it was Blair who may have played a more critical role in persuading Bush to seek a resolution from the United Nations. At a meeting with the president at Camp David in early September, Blair backed Bush on Iraq but said he needed to show he had tried U.N. diplomacy. Bush agreed, and later referred to the Camp David session with Blair as "the cojones meeting," using a colloquial Spanish term for courage.

After the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq, Bush became increasingly impatient with their effectiveness and the role of chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. Shortly after New Year's 2003, he told Rice at his Texas ranch: "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 said much the same thing to White House political adviser Karl Rove, who had gone to Crawford to brief him on plans for his reelection campaign. In the next 10 days, Bush also made his decision known to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, who helped arrange Saudi cooperation with the U.S. military, feared Saudi interests would be damaged if Bush did not follow through on attacking Hussein, and became another advocate for war.

According to "Plan of Attack," Bush asked Rice and his longtime communications adviser, Karen Hughes, whether he should attack Iraq, but he did not specifically ask Powell or Rumsfeld. "I could tell what they thought," the president said. "I didn't need to ask their opinion about Saddam Hussein or how to deal with Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear."

Rumsfeld, whom Woodward interviewed for three hours, is portrayed in the book 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 such as Wolfowitz and Feith were.

Bush told Powell of his decision in a brief meeting in the White House. Evidently concerned about Powell's reaction, he said, "Are you with me on this? I think I have to do this. I want you with me."

"I'll do the best I can," Powell answered. "Yes, sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."

Bush said he did not remember asking the question of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, who fought Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But, he added that the two had discussed developments in Iraq.

"You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to," Bush said.

Describing what the 41st president said to him about Iraq, the 43rd president told Woodward:

"It was less 'Here's how you have to take care of the guy [Hussein]' and more 'I've been through what you've been through and I know what's happening and therefore I love you' would be a more accurate way to describe it."

2004 The Washington Post Company

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

Wash Post: Bush Began to Plan War Three Months After 9-11