I'm starting to feel like Kurt Eichenwald's publicist. But a piece of his from Vanity Fair went up online today about Bush and Blair trying to get everybody into Iraq, and it's really a kick in the teeth to both of them.
It quotes Bush as saying that, with the invasion of Iraq, "Biblical prophesies are being fulfilled" and that the war was "willed by God." It says that Tony Blair was told by his own Attorney General that the war was illegal, that Blair lied to Bush about that, and that the AG only reversed himself days before the invasion because of pressure from Blair, Bush quoted from the Torah to Arabs as proof they should work for peace with Israel, and on an on .
more after the squiggle....
I'm just going to run through a few items of what the article says, because it's better if you just read it. (The article is written like a narrative, so the blockquotes are going to read like that.
One, is that the Brits (other than Blair) were horrified that Rumsfeld was hiding information about Iraq from others in the Administration.
Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the Chief of Defense Staff, launched into a diatribe about the West’s near helplessness to influence the course of events in Iraq. Worse, he said, was the Bush team—members of the Administration were secretive, even hiding information about the plans for Iraq from their colleagues. It was hard to tell if anyone in Washington grasped the wider strategic picture.
“Only Rumsfeld and a few others know what’s being planned,” Boyce said to Blair, mispronouncing the name as Rumsfield. “You may speak to Bush or [Condoleezza] Rice, but do they really know what’s going on?”
This one is amazing...when Bush announced his policy on Iraq at the UN, he was reading off of the wrong speech, ad-libbed and got it wrong.
“My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge,” Bush said. “If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account.”
He glanced at the teleprompter, looking for the phrase calling for a new resolution.
It wasn’t there.
But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted.
That was the next sentence on the teleprompter—an attestation to the country’s might and willpower. There was nothing about diplomacy. The words that had been the subject of such great debate had simply disappeared.
Bush took a breath. And then he winged it.
“We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions…” he began.
**
Resolutions? That’s odd, the British Ambassador thought.
He was flummoxed by Bush’s use of the plural. Blair had been pushing for two resolutions, of course, but Bush had always demurred. Now, after all the fighting over whether to accept even one, the President announced he would go for two? Without warning?
It was almost as if Bush had reached his decision at the last second. The ambassador had no way of knowing that he had just witnessed the President of the United States announce what seemed to be a major international initiative by mistake, owing to a technical flub.
Slips of the tongue don’t establish national security policy, and so the calls went out quickly to inform allies that the President had misspoken. He wanted one resolution, not two.
Rice delivered the message to the Blair government in a phone call to David Manning. There had been a slip-up, she explained, and Bush had gone farther in his statements than he had intended.
“We gave the President the wrong text,” she said. “He was ad-libbing.”
With his advisors saying over and over that the Bushies did not have a good plan for a war, Blair decided to let his decisions by dictated by US-Brit politics.
“Do I support totally in public and deliver our strategy?” Blair asked. “Or do I put distance between us and lose influence?”
So many uncertainties, so many problems. Only one thing was guaranteed, Blair said. “This will not be a popular war,” he said. “And in the States, fighting an unpopular war and losing is not an option.”
One of my favorites: He quotes Bush as basically calling himself a moron.
“The truth is, I have a limited vocabulary,” Bush said. “I’m not great with words, and I have to think about what I say very carefully.”
Blair was told by a primary advisor, Jack Straw, that the Bush plan for the invasion was lousy
On July 8, Straw prepared a three-page memo to Blair deriding the American plans as fatally flawed by logical inconsistencies and pie-in-the-sky assumptions.
The Bush Administration had “no strategic concept for the military plan and, in particular, no thought apparently given to ‘day after’ scenarios,” Straw wrote in his memo to Blair.
It blithely took for granted the dubious conjecture that its military could swoop in, then rapidly identify and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The Bush team simply asserted that Kuwait would happily host a large-scale military action by the United States for up to two years, that other Gulf States would jump in with support, and that Iran and Syria would sit quietly on the sidelines as Western armies invaded their next-door neighbor.
“The support even of key allies such as Kuwait cannot be counted on in the absence of some serious groundwork by the US,” Straw wrote.
Other stuff...Putin tossed out the US/Brit intelligence on Iraq as garbage, as did Chirac of France. But Chirac also decided that he wouldn't allow France to join the coalition against Iraq because he considered Bush to be a fanatic, based on his "war willed by god" comment.
Take a read...it's great.
And if you want to follow Eichenwald on twitter, click here. I love his twitter feed. (He called Ari Fleischer a liar to his face last night.)