On Thu, 15 Apr 2004 18:16:50 -0400, Tim Cummings
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

><snip>
>While reading all the information, there is a real nasty thought:
>Did Bush just wait for something to happen, that he had a reason to invade?
><Snip>
>
>And we knew about Pear Harbor before it happened and we didn't really land
>on the moon ...
>Don't you conspiracy theorist have better things to do?

Seems, I am not that far off, or?

AP: Book Alleges Secret Iraq War Plan

By CALVIN WOODWARD and SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON - 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Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush told him to get started on a fresh one.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.

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