State of Denial

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<font size="6"><center>'State of Denial'</font size>
<font size="4">It was Bush’s decision. But Rumsfeld drove the dynamic on Iraq.
How the SecDef blew it. An exclusive excerpt.</font size></center>


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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (left) had concerns about
the ‘overbearing style’ of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
(right), according to Woodward’s book

By Bob Woodward
Newsweek
Oct. 9, 2006 issue

A movie of the George W. Bush presidency might open in the Oval Office on January 26, 2001, when Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as defense secretary. A White House photographer captured the scene. Rumsfeld wears a pin*stripe suit, and rests his left hand on a Bible held by Joyce, his wife of 46 years. His right hand is raised. Bush stands almost at attention, his head forward, his eyes cocked sharply leftward, looking intently at Rumsfeld. Vice President Dick Cheney stands slightly off to the side, his trademark half smile on his face. It is a cold, dry day, and the barren branches of the trees outside can be seen through the Oval Office windows.

Back in the days of the Ford presidency, in the wake of Watergate—the pardon of Nixon, the fall of Saigon—Cheney and Rumsfeld had worked almost daily in the same Oval Office where they once again stood. The new man in the photo, Bush, five years younger than Cheney and nearly 14 years younger than Rumsfeld, had been a student at Harvard Business School. He came to the presidency with less experience and time in government than any incoming president since Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

Well into his seventh decade, many of Rumsfeld’s peers and friends had retired, but he now stood eagerly on the cusp, ready to run the race again. He resembled John le Carre’s fictional Cold War British intelligence chief, George Smiley, a man who “had been given, in late age, a chance to return to the rained-out contests of his life and play them after all.”

“Get it right this time,” Cheney told Rumsfeld.

In his first Pentagon tour, as Ford’s secretary of defense from 1975-1977, Rumsfeld had acquired a disdain for large parts of the system he was to oversee once again. He had found the Pentagon and the vast U.S. military complex unmanageable. One night at a dinner at my house a dozen years after he had left the Pentagon the first time, he said that being secretary was “like having an electric appliance in one hand and the plug in the other and you are running around trying to find a place to put it in.” It was an image that stuck with me—Rumsfeld charging around the Pentagon E-ring, the Man with the Appliance, seeking an elusive electrical socket, trying to make things work and feeling unplugged by the generals and admirals.

“After two months on the job, it is clear that the Defense establishment is tangled in its anchor chain,” Rumsfeld dictated in a four-page memo on March 21, 2001, two months into his second tour. He was already frustrated. Congress required hundreds of reports. It seemed there might be more auditors, investigators, testing groups and monitors looking over their shoulders than there were “front-line troops with weapons.”

“The maze of constraints on the Department force it to operate in a manner that is so slow, so ponderous and so inefficient that whatever it ultimately does will inevitably be a decade or so late.”

This “Anchor Chain” memo, which Rumsfeld revised and added to, became notorious among Rumsfeld’s staff as they watched and tried to help him define the universe of his problems. It sounded like he had almost given up fixing the Pentagon during the George W. Bush presidency. The task was so hard and would take so long, he dictated in a later version, that “our job, therefore, is to work together to sharpen the sword that the next president will wield.”

“I’m the secretary of defense,” Rumsfeld insisted repeatedly in his first months in 2001. “I’m in the chain of command.” He—not the generals, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff—would deal with the White House and the president on operational matters. Rumsfeld micromanaged daily Pentagon life and rode roughshod over people. In one public confrontation at a hearing with Senator Susan Collins, the earnest Maine Republican, Rumsfeld had put her down in a manner that was stunning even for him. Collins’s voice had quivered at one point. Later, Powell A. Moore, Rumsfeld’s assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, suggested that he call her, try to smooth things over.

“Hell,” Rumsfeld said, “she needs to apologize to me.”

On one occasion, he led a delegation from Congress to the funeral in Columbia, South Carolina, for Representative Floyd Spence, a Republican who had been a pro-Pentagon hawk for three decades. Moore had arranged the seating on Rumsfeld’s plane the way everything was done in Congress, by seniority.

“I don’t want this,” Rumsfeld declared, and personally rearranged the seating—putting Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who would soon become the House Armed Services Committee chairman, in the back.

On January 20, 2003, President Bush signed a secret National Security Presidential Directive, NSPD-24. The subject: setting up an “Iraq Postwar Planning Office” within the Defense Department for the expected invasion of Iraq. Rumsfeld picked Jay Garner, a 64-year-old retired three-star general and defense industry executive to head the postwar office. Six weeks later, Garner went to the White House, mid-morning on Friday, February 28, 2003, to meet President Bush for the first time. In the Situation Room, Garner passed around copies of his handout, an 11-point presentation, and dove right in. He said four of the nine tasks his small team was supposed to be in charge of in Iraq under Bush’s NSPD-24 were plainly beyond their capabilities, including dismantling weapons of mass destruction, defeating terrorists, reshaping the Iraqi military and reshaping the other internal Iraqi security institutions.

The president nodded. No one else intervened, though Garner had just told them he couldn’t be responsible for crucial postwar tasks—the ones that had the most to do with the stated reasons for going to war in the first place—because his team couldn’t do them.

The import of what he had said seemed to sail over everyone’s heads.



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State of Denial
Newsweek's Review
Part Two
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Garner next described how he intended to divide the country into regional groups, and moved on to the interagency plans.

“Just a minute,” the president interrupted. “Where are you from?”

“Florida, sir.”

“Why do you talk like that?” he asked, apparently trying to place Garner’s accent.

“Because I was born and raised on a ranch in Florida. My daddy was a rancher.”

“You’re in,” the first rancher said approvingly. His brother Jeb was governor of the state, and the president visited regularly.

One of Garner’s talking points was, “Postwar use of Iraqi Regular Army.” He said, “We’re going to use the army. We need to use them. They have the proper skill sets.”

How many from the army? someone asked.

“I’m going to give you a big range,” Garner answered. “It’ll be between 200,000 and 300,000.”

Garner looked around the room. All the heads were bobbing north to south. Nobody challenged. Nobody had any questions about this plan.

“Thank you very much,” Bush said when Garner was done. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice started talking about something else, so Garner figured he was dismissed. As he started to walk out of the room, the president caught his eye.

“Kick ass, Jay,” Bush said.

Garner waited for Rumsfeld outside. Soon, Bush and Rice came out and walked three or four steps past Garner. Suddenly Bush turned back.

“Hey, if you have any problem with that governor down in Florida, just let me know,” he said.

Shortly after the invasion, while Garner was in Kuwait waiting to move into Iraq, Rumsfeld chose L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protégé of Henry Kissinger, to effectively replace Garner, but as a presidential envoy. On Garner’s first day in Iraq, April 22, he signed on to an agreement to set up an interim Iraqi advisory group, made up of prominent Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, many of them expatriates, to put an Iraqi face on the postwar occupation government. Two days later, Rumsfeld called to tell him Bremer was coming over, and said he wanted Garner to stay on as well.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Garner said. “You can’t have the guy who used to be in charge and the guy who’s now in charge there, because you divide the loyalties of the people. So the best thing for me is just to step out of here.”

Rumsfeld convinced Garner to stay temporarily, and the retired general and Bremer clashed, as Bremer quickly unveiled a plan to ban as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government employment.

“Hell,” Garner told him, “you won’t be able to run anything if you go this deep.”

The next day, Bremer revealed a second draft order, disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s bodyguard and special paramilitary organizations. Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster.

“We have always made plans to bring the army back,” he insisted. This new plan was just coming out of the blue, subverting months of work.

“Well, the plans have changed,” Bremer replied.

Bremer then met with the Iraqi advisory group Garner had agreed to work with. “One thing you need to realize is you’re not the government,” he told them. “We are. And we’re in charge.”

The next day, the group went home.

Garner came back to the U.S. in June and basically hid out for a couple of weeks, not wanting to see anyone at the Pentagon or talk about his experience in Iraq. Finally, on June 18, 2003, alone with Rumsfeld around the small table in the secretary’s office, Garner felt he had an obligation to state the depths of his concerns.

“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” Garner said.

“Really?” Rumsfeld said.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said. He cited the extent of the de-Baathification, getting rid of the army, and summarily dumping the Iraqi leadership group. Disbanding the military had been the biggest mistake. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

Rumsfeld and Garner went to the White House to see Bush. It was Garner’s second time with the president. “Mr. President, let me tell you a couple of stories,” Garner said. Describing meetings with Iraqis, Garner painted a positive picture. “I’d get ready to leave,” Garner said, “and this is true—as I leave they’re all thumbs-up and they’d say, ‘God bless Mr. George Bush and Mr. Tony Blair. Thank you for taking away Saddam Hussein.’ That was in 70 meetings. That always was the final response.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Bush said.

On the way out, Bush slapped Garner on the back. “Hey Jay, you want to do Iran?”

“Sir, the boys and I talked about that and we want to hold out for Cuba. We think the rum and the cigars are a little better … The women are prettier.”

Bush laughed. “You got it. You got Cuba.”

Of course with all the stories, jocularity, buddy-buddy talk, bluster and confidence in the Oval Office, Garner had left out the headline. He had not mentioned the problems he saw, or even hinted at them. He did not tell Bush about the three tragic mistakes. Once again the aura of the presidency had shut out the most important news—the bad news.

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.

Soon Rumsfeld was distancing himself from Bremer, who, on paper, was to report to the president through the secretary of defense. Rumsfeld later confirmed to me in an interview that he felt that Bremer had only “technically but not really” reported to him.

“He didn’t call home much,” Rumsfeld said of Bremer.

Rumsfeld also stepped away from the hunt for Saddam’s alleged WMD. CIA Director George Tenet proposed to Rumsfeld that the person in charge of the WMD hunt report to both of them.

“Absolutely not,” Rumsfeld said.
 
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State of Denial
Newsweek's Review
Part Three
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After Bush’s re-election in November 2004, the biggest question mark at the White House was Rumsfeld. Should he stay? White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had to approach the issue with delicacy. The biggest voice for change was outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell. In one conversation, Powell had told Card, “If I go, Don should go.” Bush had decided to replace Powell with Rice, but it was unclear who he wanted at Defense.

Card got out his “hit-by-the-bus” book, an 8½-by-11-inch spiral notebook, a half-inch thick with a blue cover. On separate pages he had lists of possible replacements for all the major administration posts, including his own. The names were listed in no particular order. Card kept the notebook in his desk at the White House and periodically added or deleted names. He had intentionally used a student notebook, something he had bought himself, so it wouldn’t be considered a government document or a presidential record that might someday be opened to history. It was private and personal.

His list of 11 possible Rumsfeld replacements included Senator Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and Republican Arizona Senator John McCain.

But Card had what he thought was a great idea—a sleeper candidate. The best replacement for Rumsfeld would be James A. Baker III. “Everyone would say, ‘Phew,’” Card said. “No learning curve. Great. Interesting.” Baker was 74, only two years older than Rumsfeld. He had served in the Marine Corps. He had been the best modern White House chief of staff, Card thought. He had successfully handled the 2000 Florida recount for Bush. Mr. President, this is my quiet counsel, Card said. Put a diplomat in the Defense Department.

The president seemed genuinely intrigued. You don’t have to rush to make a decision, Card advised. But the president would not even authorize Card to send out feelers or to enter into any discussion with Baker.

Card spoke with Rumsfeld, who talked as if he presumed there would be no change. Rumsfeld wanted to stay.

Soon Karl Rove weighed in. A contentious session with Congress was coming up. As he saw it, the Democrats were in no mood for a honeymoon. With Rice’s confirmation hearing and with the expected nomination of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, would another Senate confirmation overload the system? And, clearly, the conduct of the war in Iraq would be the subject of confirmation hearings for anyone Bush nominated to be the new secretary of defense.

Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war. Jesus, no.

In mid-December the president made his final decision. Rumsfeld would stay, he indicated to Cheney and Card. He couldn’t change Rumsfeld.

“That didn’t mean he didn’t want to,” Card later said.

Card tried to have a private, candid session with First Lady Laura Bush about every six weeks to hear her concerns. He set aside an hour and a half for each meeting. Sometimes it took 30 minutes, sometimes the full hour and one half and on occasion two hours.

The first lady was distressed about the war, worried that Rumsfeld was hurting her husband, and her perspective seemed to reflect Rice’s concern about Rumsfeld’s over*bearing style and tendency to dominate. Card knew that the first lady and Rice often took long walks together on the Camp David weekends.

“I agree with you,” Card said. On one level he was trying to educate and explain, but he was also lobbying. So he outlined his problems with Rumsfeld and how he believed it was time for a change. He said, however, so far his advice on the Rumsfeld situation had been considered and rejected.

“He’s happy with this,” the first lady said, “but I’m not.” Another time she said, “I don’t know why he’s not upset with this.”

As the new secretary of state, Rice hired Philip Zelikow, an old friend, as the counselor to the State Department, a powerful but little known top post that would leave him free to undertake special assignments for her, and quickly dispatched him and a small team to Iraq. On February 10, Rice’s 14th day as secretary, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced memo classified SECRET/NODIS, meaning “no distribution” to anyone else. “At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change,” Rice read. This was a shocking notion—“a failed state,” after two years, thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war. Jesus, no.


In midsummer 2005, General Jim Jones, the NATO commander, paid a call on his old friend General Pete Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It was virtually certain that Pace was going to move up to become chairman, the number one military position.

The two Marine generals had been friends for more than three decades. They had been in Vietnam at about the same time, a searing and formative experience for both, and then served side-by-side as first lieutenants in 1970 at the Marine barracks in southeast Washington.

Jones expressed chagrin that Pace would even want to be chairman. “You’re going to face a debacle and be part of the debacle in Iraq,” he said. U.S. prestige was at a 50- or 75-year low in the world. He said he was so worried about Iraq and the way Rumsfeld ran things that he wondered if he himself should not resign in protest. “How do you have the stomach for eight years in the Pentagon?” he finally asked.

Pace said that someone had to be chairman. Who else would do it?

Jones did not have an answer. “Military advice is being influenced on a political level,” he said. The JCS had improperly “surrendered” to Rumsfeld. “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder.”

His concern was complete. When Senators John Warner and Carl Levin, the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, visited him at his headquarters in Belgium, Jones told them about all the problems. He said they needed new legislationto re-empower the service chiefs or make some kind of sense of the crazy system.

“The Joint Chiefs have been systematically emasculated by Rumsfeld,” Jones said.

Pace soon became chairman. In an interview, he flatly denied that Jones had told him that Iraq was a debacle or that Rumsfeld had systematically emasculated the Joint Chiefs. “He’s a good friend. He was in my wedding,” Pace said, noting they had known each other for 36 years. “If Jim felt that way he would tell me.”

I called Jones at NATO headquarters in Belgium. He said that he had made all those comments to Pace in their meeting in 2005. “That’s what I told him,” Jones said.

In March 2006, Rumsfeld invited six of the Pentagon’s regular outside advisers in to be briefed and ask questions. One was Ken Adelman, a longtime Rumsfeld friend and vehement early supporter of the war who had become entirely disillusioned over the administration’s handling of the postwar. His relationship with Rumsfeld was almost over.

“What metrics would you use for success in Iraq?” Adelman asked Rumsfeld. “You know, for winning the war?”

“Oh, there are hundreds,” Rumsfeld replied. “It’s just so complicated that there are hundreds.”

“Wait a minute,” Adelman insisted. “A former boss of mine always said identify three or four things, then always ask about, get measurements and you’ll get progress or else you’ll never get any progress.” The former boss was Rumsfeld himself, who had driven the point home to Adelman 35 years ago, when he worked for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity. What are they? Adelman insisted.

Rumsfeld said it was so complicated that he could not give a list. “Hundreds,” he insisted.

Adelman believed that meant there was a total lack of accountability. If Rumsfeld didn’t agree to any criteria, he couldn’t be said to have failed on any criteria.

“Then you don’t have anything,” Adelman said. He left as dis*turbed as ever. There was no accountability.

On March 16, General John Abizaid, the commander of CENTCOM and thus the top military officer for the Middle East, was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq. Afterward, he went over to see Congressman John Murtha, the 73-year old former Marine who had introduced a resolution the previous November calling for the redeployment of troops from Iraq as soon as practicable. Sitting at the round, dark wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis and held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Rumsfeld circulated a six-page SECRET memo on May 1, proposing some fixes, entitled “Illustrative New 21st Century Institutions and Approaches.”

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State of Denial
Newsweek's Review
Part 4 of 4
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It was almost the latest version of the “Anchor Chain” memos he had written in his first months as secretary in 2001—a cry from his bureaucratic and managerial heart. Not only was the Defense Department tangled in its anchor chain but so was the rest of the U.S. government, and the world.

He dictated, “The charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”

On Wednesday, May 24, 2006, the intelligence division of the Joint Staff, the J-2, circulated an intelligence assessment, classified SECRET, that showed that the forces of terror in Iraq were not in retreat. It put hard numbers on trends that had been reported to Bush all year. Terrorist attacks had been steadily increasing. The insurgency was gaining. Attacks were now averaging 700 to 800 a week. Every IED that was discovered—whether it detonated and caused damage or casualties or was identified and disarmed before it could do any damage—was still counted as an attack. A graph measuring attacks from May 2003 to May 2006 showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks was as high as they had ever been—exceeding 3,500 a month.

I told Rumsfeld that I understood the number of attacks was going up.

“That’s probably true,” he said. “It is also probably true that our data’s better, and we’re categorizing more things as attacks. 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.”

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 IEDs, standoff attacks with mortars, and close-engagements such as ambushes—as far from bananas, apples and oranges as possible.

During one week in May 2006, enemy-initiated attacks soared to 900, a new record. In June, attacks went down to about 825 one week but then spiked up again. By July it was over 1,000 a week, again a new record. It was even worse considering the level of violence existed after two years spent training, equipping and funding 263,000 Iraqi soldiers and police. The cost had been $10 billion, and American teams had been embedded with most of the Iraqi units for over a year. At an equivalent time in 1971, after several years of Vietnamization, the trend lines of insurgent violence had been down, not up.


In July 2006, I interviewed Rumsfeld on two successive afternoons. I asked him about troop levels—a key issue and point of contention. The record showed that the plan for invading Iraq had a top number of 275,000 ground combat forces, including about 90,000 who were scheduled to flow into Iraq in the weeks and months after March 19, 2003, when the war began. Rumsfeld said it is one of the great “canards” that he had decided or unduly influenced the decision to not bring in the 90,000. It was all on General Franks’s recommendation, he said. But by the summer of 2006, Rumsfeld had softened his position on the issue of whether there were enough troops. “It’s entirely possible there were too many at some point and too few at some point, because no one’s perfect,” he said. “In retrospect I have not seen or heard anything from the other opiners that suggests to me that they have any reason to believe that they were right and we were wrong. Nor can I prove we were right and they were wrong. The only thing I can say is they seem to have a lot more certainty than my assessment of the facts would permit me to have.”

Asked about the battle with the Iraq insurgency, he said, “It could take eight to 10 years. Insurgencies have a tendency to do that.” Overall he said, “Our exit strategy is to have the Iraqis’ government and security forces capable of managing a lower-level insurgency and ultimately achieving victory over it and repressing it over time. But it would be a period after we may very well not have large numbers of people there.”

I said I understood that General George W. Casey Jr., the top commander of forces on the ground in Iraq, had reported that the insurgency had not been neutralized—key goal of his campaign plan—but only contained. After some typical verbal jousting, I was able to ask directly, “Do you agree it has not been neutralized?”

“Oh clearly not,” Rumsfeld answered.

“Only contained?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Thus far.”

I then read from the May 24, 2006, assessment that said the “Sunni Arab insurgency is gaining strength and increasing capacity.” I asked him, “Does that sound right to you?”

Here was one of the central questions in any war. Was the other side “gaining strength and increasing capacity?” General Casey the Joint Chiefs’ intelligence staff, and the CIA had all categorically said the insurgency was gaining. Certainly Rumsfeld knew that. I had also quoted from the assessment on a list of 29 sample questions I had submitted in advance, and I know he had spent at least one hour the day before preparing for the interview.

“When was this?” Rumsfeld asked.

Six weeks ago, I answered. The question on the table was whether he agreed or not that the insurgency in the Iraq War was gaining. I was ready for a pure Rumsfeldian moment, and I was not disappointed.

“Gosh, I don’t know,” the secretary of defense replied. “I don’t want to comment on it. I read so many of those intelligence reports”—I had never said it was an intelligence report—“and they are all over the lot. In a given day you can see one from one agency, and one from another agency, and then I’ll ask Casey or Abizaid what they think about it, or Pete Pace, ‘Is that your view?’ And try and triangulate and see what people think. But it changes from month to month. I’m not going to go back and say I agree or don’t agree with something like that.”

He was right that there might be some changes month to month, but, as he knew, the overall assessment and trend was visibly, measurably and dramatically worse.

I asked Rumsfeld what was the best, most optimistic scenario for a positive outcome in Iraq.

“This business is ugly,” he replied. “It’s tough. There isn’t any best. A long, hard slog, I think I wrote years ago. We’re facing a set of challenges that are different than our country understands … They’re different than our Congress understands. They’re different than our government, much of our government, probably understands and is organized or trained or equipped to cope with and deal with. We’re dealing with enemies that can turn inside our decision circles.” The enemy can move swiftly, he said. “They don’t have parliaments and bureaucracies and real estate to defend and interact with or deal with or cope with. They can do what they want. They aren’t held accountable for lying or for killing innocent men, women and children.

“There’s something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people’s heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn’t do.”

“Are you optimistic?” I asked.

Rumsfeld looked through me and continued. Three of his aides who were sitting with us at the table in his office could not help but register surprise as Rumsfeld plowed on without answering.

“We’re fighting the first war in history in the new century,” he continued, “and with all these new realities, with an industrial-age organization in an environment that has not adapted and adjusted, a public environment that has not adapted and adjusted.”

At the end of the second of two interviews, I quoted former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “Any military commander who is honest with you will say he’s made mistakes that have cost lives.”

“Um hmm,” Rumsfeld said.

“Is that correct?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that a military commander ...”

“Which you are,” I interrupted.

“No I’m not,” the secretary of defense said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“No, no. Well … ”

“Yes. Yes,” I said, raising my hand in the air and ticking off the hierarchy. “It’s commander in chief, secretary of defense, combatant commander.”

“I can see a military commander in a uniform who is engaged in a conflict having to make decisions that result in people living or dying and that that would be a truth. And certainly if you go up the chain to the civilian side to the president and to me, you could by indirection, two or three steps removed, make the case.”

Indirection? Two or three steps removed? It was inexplicable. Rumsfeld had spent so much time insisting on the chain of command. He was in control—not the Joint Chiefs, not the uniformed military, not the National Security Council or the NSC staff, not the critics or the opiners. How could he not see his role and responsibility?

I could think of nothing more to say.

Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this article.

Adapted from "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward. Published by Simon & Shuster. © 2006 Bob Woodward. Author's Note: Nearly all the information in "State of Denial" comes from interviews with President 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 the Iraq war.


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<br><font face="arial black" size="5" color="#FF0000"><center>Bob Woodward: Bush LIES On Iraq</font></center><br><font face="arial" size="3" color="#FFFFFF">Bob Woodward tells Mike Wallace that the Bush administration has not been honest about the level of violence in Iraq. The veteran reporter also reveals to Wallace that Henry Kissinger advises the Bush White House on its Iraq policy.<br><br><center>[wm]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/60Minutes-Woodward-StateOfDenial.wmv[/wm]</center><p></td></tr></table>
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Bush is still in a "State of Denial" even as the earth beneath him & the Neocons crumbles.</font>

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Is President Bush Sane? </font><font face="helvetica, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
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December 01, 2006
<br>By <a href="http://www.vdare.com/asp/index.htm">Paul Craig Roberts</a></strong>
<br>Tens of millions of Americans want President George W. Bush to be <a href="http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/060224_vfl.htm">impeached</a> for the lies and deceit he used to launch an illegal war and for violating his oath of office to uphold the US Constitution. Millions of other Americans want Bush turned over to the war crimes tribunal at the Hague. The true fate that awaits Bush is psychiatric incarceration.
<br>The president of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.
<br>Delusion still rules Bush three weeks after the American people repudiated him and his catastrophic war in elections that delivered both House and Senate to the Democrats in the hope that control over Congress would give the opposition party the strength to oppose the mad occupant of the White House.
<br>On <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/11/20061128-13.html">November 28</a> Bush insisted that US troops would not be withdrawn from Iraq until he had completed his mission of building a stable Iraqi democracy capable of spreading democratic change in the Middle East.
<br>Bush made this astonishing statement the day after NBC News, a major television network, declared Iraq to be in the midst of a civil war, a judgment with which former Secretary of State Colin Powell concurs.
<br>The same day that Bush reaffirmed his commitment to building a stable Iraqi democracy, a secret US Marine Corps intelligence report was leaked. According to the <em>Washington Post</em>, the report concludes: <strong>&ldquo;the social and political situation has deteriorated to a point that US and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar province.&rdquo; [</strong><em><a href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112906L.shtml">Anbar Picture Grows Clearer, and Bleaker</a></em> By Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks]
<br>The Marine Corps intelligence report says that Al Qaeda is the <strong>&ldquo;dominant organization of influence&rdquo; </strong>in Anbar province, and is more important than local authorities, the Iraqi government and US troops<strong> &ldquo;in its ability to control the day-to-day life of the average Sunni.&rdquo;</strong>
<br>Bush&rsquo;s astonishing determination to deny Iraq reality was made the same day that the US-installed Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki and US puppet King Abdullah II of Jordan abruptly cancelled a meeting with Bush after Bush was already in route to Jordan on Air Force One.
<br>Bush could not meet with Maliki in Iraq, because violence in Baghdad is out of control. For security reasons, the US Secret Service <a href="http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/112906CARMICHAEL.shtml">would not allow President Bush to go to Iraq,</a> where he is <strong>&ldquo;building a stable democracy.&rdquo;</strong>
<br>Bush made his astonishing statement in the face of news leaks of the Iraq Study Group&rsquo;s call for a withdrawal of all US combat forces from Iraq. The Iraq Study Group is led by Bush family operative James A. Baker, a former White House chief of staff, former Secretary of the Treasury, and former Secretary of State. Baker was tasked by <a href="http://www.vdare.com/roberts/wisdom_folly.htm">father Bush</a> to save the son. Apparently, son Bush hasn&rsquo;t enough sanity to allow himself to be saved.
<br>Bush&rsquo;s denial of Iraqi reality was made even as one of the most influential Iraqi Shiite leaders, Moqtada al-Sadr, is building an anti-US parliamentary alliance to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
<br>Maliki himself appears on the verge of desertion by his American sponsors. The White House has reportedly <strong>&ldquo;lost confidence&rdquo; </strong>in<strong> </strong>Maliki&rsquo;s <strong><a href="http://politics.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061129/wl_mideast_afp/usiraqmalikihadley">&ldquo;ability to control violence.&rdquo;</a></strong> Fox <strong>&ldquo;News&rdquo;</strong> disinformation agency immediately began blaming Maliki for the defeat the US has suffered in Iraq. NY governor Pataki told Fox <strong>&ldquo;News&rdquo;</strong> [<a href="http://www.ibctoday.com/News/ViewNewsItem.aspx?newsItemId=11414&amp;rootVideoPanelType=1">Video</a>] that <strong>&ldquo;Maliki is not doing his job.&rdquo;</strong> Pataki claimed that US troops were doing <strong>&ldquo;a great job.&rdquo;</strong>
<br>A number of other politicians and talking heads joined in the scapegoating of Maliki. No one explained how Maliki can be expected to save Iraq when US troops cannot provide enough security for the Iraqi government to go outside the heavily fortified <strong>&ldquo;green zone&rdquo;</strong> that occupies a small area of Baghdad.
<br>If the US Marines cannot control Anbar province, what chance is there for Maliki? What can Maliki do if the security provided by US troops is so bad that the President of the US cannot even visit the country?
<br>The only people in Iraq who are safe belong to Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents or are Shiite militia leaders such as al-Sadr.
<br>An American group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed war crimes charges in Germany against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A number of former US attorneys believe President Bush and Vice President Cheney deserve the same.
<br>Bush has destroyed the entire social, political, and economic fabric of Iraq. Saddam Hussein sat on the lid of Pandora&rsquo;s Box of sectarian antagonisms, but Bush has opened the lid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as <strong>&ldquo;collateral damage&rdquo;</strong> in Bush&rsquo;s war to bring <strong>&ldquo;stable democracy&rdquo;</strong> to Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iraqi children have been orphaned and maimed. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have fled their country. The Middle East is aflame with hatred of America, and the ground is shaking under the feet of American puppet governments in the Middle East. US casualties (killed and wounded) number 25,000.
<br>And Bush has not had enough!
<br>What better proof of Bush&rsquo;s insanity could there be?
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http://www.vdare.com/roberts/061201_sane.htm
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Has He Started Talking to the Walls?</font><font face="trebuchet ms, helvetica, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
<b>Dec 3, 2006

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by Frank Rich</b>

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...Q275Q20Q27Q25qQ5DZQ5DQ25ZQ275Q20Q7DQ5D,XUXJVb


IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is ''The Final Days,'' the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda ''extremely disorganized'' in Iraq, adding that ''I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level.'' Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2 percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's ''unity government'' though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation ''in the historic sense.'') After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him ''the right guy for Iraq'' the morning after. This came only a day after The Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either ''ignorant of what is going on'' in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrapheap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi Army that we've been helping to ''stand up'' at hideous cost all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadr's existence.

In his classic study, ''The Great War and Modern Memory,'' Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until ''the mission is complete'' even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of ''victory,'' another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is ''phase,'' as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. ''Phase'' is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn't want to hear, ''civil war.''

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive -- but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over ''civil war'' at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.

It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the ''abuses'' at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called torture. And that the ''manipulation'' of prewar intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is ''pullback,'' the Iraq Study Group's reported euphemism to stave off the word ''retreat'' (if not retreat itself).

In the case of ''civil war,'' it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the ''Today'' show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word ''war'' itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his ''Bushisms'' or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have believed he is a cynic -- that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when the president said that ''absolutely, we're winning'' in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage -- watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki -- that can't be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress. Mr. Bush asked ''How's your boy?'' But when Mr. Webb replied, ''I'd like to get them out of Iraq,'' the president refused to so much as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day -- special envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international conference, NATO -- urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he is bringing ''democracy'' to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report -- uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post -- concluding that American troops ''are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.'' That finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq don't give a damn what we call it. </font>
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The Roman Empire is falling - so it turns to Iran and Syria</font><font face="helvetica, verdana" size="3" color="#000000"><b>

December 7th 2006
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by ROBERT FISK</b>


The Roman Empire is falling. That, in a phrase, is what the Baker report says. The legions cannot impose their rule on Mesopotamia.

Just as Crassus lost his legions' banners in the deserts of Syria-Iraq, so has George W Bush. There is no Mark Antony to retrieve the honour of the empire. The policy "is not working". "Collapse" and "catastrophe" - words heard in the Roman senate many a time - were embedded in the text of the Baker report. Et tu, James?

This is also the language of the Arab world, always waiting for the collapse of empire, for the destruction of the safe Western world which has provided it with money, weapons, political support. First, the Arabs trusted the British Empire and Winston Churchill, and then they trusted the American Empire and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and all the other men who would give guns to the Israelis and billions to the Arabs - Nixon, Carter, Clinton, Bush...

And now they are told that the Americans are not winning the war; that they are losing. If you were an Arab, what would you do?

Be sure, they are not asking this question in Washington. The Middle East - so all-important (supposedly) in the "war on terror" - in itself, a myth - doesn't really matter in the White House. It is a district, a map, a region, every bit as amorphous as the crescent of "crisis" which the Clinton administration invented when it wanted to land its troops in Somalia. How to get out, how to save face, that's the question. To hell with the people who live there: the Arabs, the Iraqis, the men, women and children whom we kill - and whom the Iraqis kill - every day.

Note how our "spokesmen" in Afghanistan now acknowledge the dead woman and children of Nato airstrikes as if it is quite in order to slaughter these innocents because we are at war with the horrid Taliban.

Some of the same mindset has arrived in Baghdad, where "coalition" spokesmen also - from time to time - jump in front of the video-tape evidence by accepting that they, too, kill women and children in their war against "terror". But it is the sentences of impotence that doom empires. "The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing." There is a risk of a "slide towards chaos [sic] [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq's government and a humanitarian catastrophe."

But hasn't that already happened? "Collapse" and "catastrophe" are daily present in Iraq. America's ability "to influence events" has been absent for years. And let's just re-read the following sentence: "Violence is increasing in scope and lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency. Shiite [Shia] militias, death squads, al-Qa'ida and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability."

Come again? Where was this "widespread criminality," this "sectarian conflict" when Saddam, our favourite war criminal, was in power? What do the Iraqis think about this? And how typical that the American media went at once to hear Bush's view of the Baker report - rather than the reaction of the Iraqis, those who are on the receiving end of our self-induced tragedy in Mesopotamia.

They will enjoy the idea that American troops should be "embedded" with Iraqi forces - not so long ago, it was the press that had to be "embedded" with the Americans! - as if the Romans were ready to put their legions amid the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths to ensure their loyalty.

What the Romans did do, of course - and what the Americans would never do - is offer their subjects Roman citizenship. Every tribe - in Gaul or Bythinia or Mesopotamia - who fell under Roman rule became a citizen of Rome. What could Washington have done with Iraq if it had offered American citizenship to every Iraqi? There would have been no insurrection, no violence, no collapse or catastrophe, no Baker report. But no. We wanted to give these people the fruits of our civilisation - not the civilisation itself. From this, they were banned.

And the result? The nations we supposedly hated - Iran and Syria - are now expected to save us from ourselves. "Given the ability [sic] of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively."

I love those words. Especially "engage". Yes, the "influence of America" is diminishing. The influence of Syria and Iran is growing. That just about sums up the "war on terror". Any word yet, I wonder, from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara?

<b>The strategies </b>

The Baker panel considered four options, all of which it rejected:

<b><u>Cut And Run</u></b>

Baker believes it would cause a humanitarian disaster, while al-Qa'ida would expand further.

<b><u>Stay The Course</b></u>

Baker accepts that current US policy is not working. Nearly 100 Americans are dying every month. The US is spending $2bn (£1bn) a week and has lost public support.

<b><u>Send In More Troops</u></b>

Increases in US troop levels would not solve the cause of violence in Iraq. Violence would simply rekindle as soon as US forces moved.

<b><u>Regional Devolution</u></b>

If the country broke up into its Shia, Sunni and Kurd regions, it would lead to ethnic cleansing and mass population moves.

Baker outlines a fifth option - 'responsible transition' - in which the number of US forces could be increased to shore up the Iraqi army while it takes over primary responsibility for combat operations. US troops would then decrease slowly.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited 12/8/2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2054595.ece
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Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in Denial</font>


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by Robert Fisk; Independent; December 04, 2006</b>

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq "until the job is complete"? The "job" - Washington's project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel's image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

History's "deniers" are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be kind. George W Bush - or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter - need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.

In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah's Iran as "an island of stability in the region" only days before Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution brought down his regime. President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters.

And was it not Saddam Hussein who promised the "mother of all battles" for Kuwait before the great Iraqi retreat in 1991? And was it not Saddam again who predicted a US defeat in the sands of Iraq in 2003? Saddam's loyal acolyte, Mohamed el-Sahaf, would fantasise about the number of American soldiers who would die in the desert; George W Bush let it be known that he sometimes slipped out of White House staff meetings to watch Sahaf's preposterous performance and laugh at the fantasies of Iraq's minister of information.

So who is laughing at Bush now? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, almost as loyal a retainer to Bush as Sahaf was to Saddam, receives the same false praise from the American president that Nasser and Brezhnev once lavished upon their generals. "I appreciate the courage you show during these difficult times as you lead your country," Bush tells Maliki. "He's the right guy for Iraq," he tells us. And the Iraqi Prime Minister who hides in the US-fortified "Green Zone" - was ever a crusader fortress so aptly named? - announces that "there is no problem". Power must be more quickly transferred to Maliki, we were informed yesterday. Why? Because that will save Iraq? Or because this will allow America to claim, as it did when it decided to allow the South Vietnamese army to fight on its own against Hanoi, that Washington is not to blame for the debacle that follows? "One of his frustrations with me is that he believes that we've been slow about giving him the tools necessary to protect the Iraqi people." Or so Bush says. "He doesn't have the capacity to respond. So we want to accelerate that capacity." But how can Maliki have any "capacity" at all when he rules only a few square miles of central Baghdad and a clutch of rotting ex-Baathist palaces?

About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush's remark that "there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all." Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power. The withdrawal of Shia ministers from Maliki's cabinet mirror the withdrawal of Shia ministers from another American-supported administration in Beirut - where the Lebanese fear an equally appalling conflict over which Washington has, in reality, no military or political control.

Bush even appeared oblivious of the current sectarian map of Iraq. "The Prime Minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition of Iraq would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence," he said. "I agree." But Iraq is already "split into parts". The fracture of Iraq is virtually complete, its chasms sucking in corpses at the rate of up to a thousand a day.

Even Hitler must chuckle at this bloodbath, he who claimed in April 1945 that Germany would still win the Second World War, boasting that his enemy, Roosevelt, had died - much as Bush boasted of Zarqawi's killing - while demanding to know when General Wenck's mythical army would rescue the people of Berlin. How many "Wencks" are going to be summoned from the 82nd Airborne or the Marine Corps to save Bush from Iraq in the coming weeks? No, Bush is not Hitler. Like Blair, he once thought he was Winston Churchill, a man who never - ever - lied to his people about Britain's defeats in war. But fantasy knows no bounds.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2029238.ece

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Bush Cheney Rumsfled Wmd Lies Ultimate Video

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:smh:
This, my friends, is the ultimate clip regarding WMD lies - the clip we have all been waiting for. All the lies of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell compiled together, brilliantly done, with some great "extra" material.

THERE own lies on tape.
:angry:
 
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