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Bush at War
by
James Bovard,
May 2003
This article was posted March 5, 2003.
Bob Woodward, the famed Watergate investigator and now a
senior editor at the Washington Post, was granted
unprecedented access to George W. Bush and to some of the
top players in his administration in the wake of
September 11. The result is a new book — Bush at War
— which chronicles in an uncritical manner the
thoughts and words of the inner sanctum of the Bush
administration after the terrorist strike.
Most of the book — like most political speeches
— is blather. But there are some comments by Bush
and others that provide insight into how the Bush
administration sees the world — and itself. And as
Bush lurches into another war in the Middle East, the
comments and thoughts from the September 11 period are
more relevant than ever.
It is especially interesting to see the early debate
within the administration on the issue of Iraq.
At a White House meeting on September 12, 2001, Vice
President Cheney urged, “To the extent we define our
task broadly, including those who support terrorism, then
we get at states. And it’s easier to find them than
it is to find bin Laden.”
That is the “round up the usual suspects”
mentality brought to the war on terrorism.
Bush replied, “Start with bin Laden, which Americans
expect. And then if we succeed, we’ve struck a huge
blow and can move forward.... We don’t want to
define [the threat] too broadly for the average man to
understand.”
The book highlights how Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz was obsessively pushing to attack Iraq even
before September 11. At a Pentagon press briefing a few
days after September 11, Wolfowitz announced,
“It’s not just simply a matter of capturing
people and holding them accountable, but removing the
sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states
who sponsor terrorism. It will be a campaign, not a
single action.”
Wolfowitz’s “ending states” promise
sparked critical comment around the world. When asked
about the Wolfowitz statement, Secretary of State Colin
Powell replied, “Ending terrorism is where I would
like to leave it, and let Mr. Wolfowtiz speak for
himself.”
At a subsequent meeting of top administration officials,
Wolfowitz again pushed to attack Iraq. Woodward
summarized the arguments he made to the inner sanctum:
“Attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain. He
worried about 100,000 American troops bogged down in
mountain fighting in Afghanistan six months from then. In
contrast, Iraq was a brittle, oppressive regime that
might break easily. It was doable. He estimated that
there was a 10 to 50% chance Saddam was involved in the
September 11 terrorist attacks. The US would have to go
after Saddam at some time if the war on terrorism was to
be taken seriously.”
Thus, a hypothetical 10 percent chance that Saddam was
linked to the September 11 hijackers was sufficient to
invade and capture all of Iraq.
At a White House meeting shortly thereafter, Bush
suddenly announced, “I believe Iraq was involved,
but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t
have the evidence at this point.” But, as the
subsequent history of Bush’s presidency has shown,
he never allows lack of evidence to block the path of
righteousness.
After the administration committed itself to invading
Afghanistan, the Pentagon sent over a two-star general to
present a slide show to Bush on options to bring down the
Taliban. As Woodward notes, “One slide about
potential operations in Afghanistan was labeled
‘Thinking Outside the Box — Poisoning Food
Supply.’ The National Security Council staff in charge of
putting on the show for Bush “almost gagged”
and reminded National Security Council advisor Connie
Rice that ‘the US doesn“t know how to do this,
and we’re not allowed. It would be a chemical or
biological attack, clearly banned by treaties the US had
signed.”
Woodward notes, “Rice took the slide to Rumsfeld.
‘This slide is not going to be shown to the
President of the United States,’ she said. A poison
attack was exactly what they feared from bin Laden. How
was it conceivable that someone could imagine adopting
bin Laden’s tactics and presenting the idea to the
President?”
The pious response by all involved is almost amusing.
Obviously, at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the
thought of poisoning a nation’s food supply was fair
game. But it was a serious breach of propriety to
formally present the idea to the president.
Administration officials seemed to enjoy pushing the hot
buttons of the American people. In war-council
discussions over what to include in Bush’s September
20, 2001, speech to Congress and the American people,
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld suggested mentioning that
weapons of mass destruction could be used against America
by the terrorists. He favored mentioning this threat
because “it’s an energizer for the American
people.”
Rumsfeld became the darling of the press corps in part
because of his light-hearted, bantering manner at
Pentagon press conferences. Woodward related one of his
witticisms from an October 2001 press briefing:
“‘We are not running out of targets,
Afghanistan is,’ Rumfeld joked a few days into the
bombing campaign.” But this was a bombing campaign
that killed hundreds of innocent Afghans and repeatedly
bombed UN food warehouses and other nonmilitary targets.
But that was irrelevant for most of the Washington
Pentagon press corps as long as Rumsfeld provided such
good copy.
When bombing mistakes finally made newspaper headlines,
Secretary of State Powell criticized Pentagon inaccuracy
at a war-council meeting. Bush jumped in: “We also
need to highlight the fact that the Taliban are killing
people and conducting their own terror operations, so get
a little bit more balance here about what the situation
is.”
A few good press releases — or better media spin
— was all that was necessary to make irrelevant the
innocent Afghans killed by the U.S. military.
Similarly, as the Taliban regime collapsed, Bush told his
war council, “We need to manage the publicity here.
We need to emphasize the cowardly atrocities that Taliban
performed as they left the city.” The Taliban were
apparently fleeing the scene so fast that they did not
have time for a ritual slaughter of the innocents. But
George Bush wanted his atrocity stories, come hell or
high water.
His close-mindedness and pettiness loom larger as the
book goes along. In the epilogue, Woodward notes,
“When it came to fighting terrorism, the president
also wanted world leaders to equate their national
interests with American interests. Some would go along
with him when their interests and goals coincided roughly
with his, but go their own way when they did not. Bush
didn’t like that when it happened and at times he
took it personally.”
It is almost comical to recognize that Bush believed that
September 11 somehow gave him the right to demand
submission and conformity from every other government on
Earth. And yet that is the impetus of U.S. foreign
policy.
Bush administration officials relished the adulation the
president received after September 11. Bush went to New
York City to throw out the first ball of Game 3 of the
2001 World Series and the crowd went wild. Woodward
notes, “Watching from owner George
Steinbrenner’s box, Karl Rove thought,
‘It’s like being at a Nazi rally.’”
Rove later told Woodward how the war on terrorism would
be judged by the public: “Everything will be
measured by results. The victor is always right. History
ascribes to the victor qualities that may or may not
actually have been there. And similarly to the
defeated.”
American bloodlust shines through in many places in the
book — not least with Bush’s obsessive
“scorecards” in which he marked off the names
of dead al-Qaeda leaders. And when CIA counterterrorism
chief Cofer Black visited Moscow shortly after September
11 to work out arrangements with the Russians for
whacking Afghanistan, and a Russian official warned him
that, if the United States went into Afghanistan,
“You’re really going to get the hell kicked out
of you,” Black replied, “We’re going to
kill them. We’re going to put their heads on sticks.
We’re going to rock their world.”
Woodward tells of a religious prayer meeting on February
5, 2002, attended by 25 men — including three
different Special Forces units and CIA paramilitary
teams. After a prayer and the invocation of September 11,
one of the attendees — speaking for the group — pledged, “We will export death and
violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of
our great nation.”
The lust to dominate the world shines through both in
Bush and others in his administration. And yet Rumsfeld,
in a speech at the Pentagon on the one-month anniversary
of September 11, condemned the terrorists:
“The will to power, the urge to dominion over others
... makes the terrorist a believer not in the theology of
God, but the theology of self and in the whispered words
of temptation: ‘ye shall be as gods.’ In
targeting this place, then, and those who worked here,
the attackers, the evildoers correctly sensed that the
opposite of all they were, and stood for, resided
here.”
This is at the same time the Pentagon was masterminding
the bombing of Afghanistan and threatening to attack
several other nations. Yet because Bush, Rumsfeld, and
other chief honchos believed in God, their powerlust is a
supreme virtue.
James Bovard is author of Lost Rights (1994) and the forthcoming Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush's Crusade is Sabotaging Peace, Justice, and Freedom (St. Martin's Press, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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