Woodward book portrays White House in disarray
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Bob Woodward has written a new book on the Bush administration's Iraq war policy. File Photo |
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By David E. Sanger New York Times - Published: September 30, 2006
WASHINGTON — The White House on Friday attempted to dismiss a new book's portrayal of division and discord inside the Bush administration, suggesting that the account by Bob Woodward was provided by former aides who believed their advice on troop levels and other questions of strategy had been ignored.
Even as the White House scrambled to obtain a few copies of the book, "State of Denial," on Friday, administration officials were rebutting specific examples contained in Woodward's account, which described bitter clashes and long-running feuds fueled by the debate over the unraveling of the war in Iraq. But other administration officials acknowledged that the accounts spelled out in the new book reflected a breakdown of discipline in an administration that once prized its ability to keep its disputes in house.
"Look, this is a war, and you are going to have a lot of really smart people with completely different opinions," Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing on Friday afternoon that was delayed so that he could leaf through a copy of the book.
In Washington, he said, "you're going to see people who are on the losing side of arguments being especially outspoken about their opinions." Then, he added, "The average Washington memoir ought to be subtitled, 'If they only listened to me."'
But Snow had difficulty explaining why Bush had failed to listen to such a broad range of officials who called for more troops, including Robert D. Blackwill, the former top Iraq adviser, and L. Paul Bremer, the senior U.S. official running the occupation. Snow also did not explain why Bush's upbeat assessments of America's "Plan for Victory" in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches he gave late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified communications written by administration officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.
Some of those memorandums were written by Philip Zelikow, an advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Zelikow characterized the country as still "a failed state" two years after the U.S.-led invasion, and another in September 2005, in which he said there was only a 70 percent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state. That meant, Zelikow said, that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, including what he called a "significant risk" of "catastrophic failure," meaning a collapse of the state Bush has attempted to create.
Zelikow declined to comment Friday, apart from confirming the accuracy of the words from the memos that Woodward cited in the book.
Other senior State Department officials dismissed Woodward's account as a familiar one. "This just in — Condi and Rumsfeld argue a lot," said one. "Didn't we know that?"
In the past State Department officials have described extreme tensions over Rice's sense that Rumsfeld was not paying enough attention to detention issues, beginning with the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that came to light in 2004.
The book contends that the former White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., urged Bush beginning after the election of 2004 and again last year to replace Rumsfeld.
In a telephone interview on Friday from California, Card confirmed that he had raised the issue, but suggested that Woodward had ignored the context. "Right after the election I went to Camp David and talked to the president, and we talked about a lot of changes, starting with the chief of staff," said Card, recounting how he used to tote around what he called his "hit by a bus book," a notebook full of lists of potential replacements for members of the senior White House staff and top Cabinet officials.
"It's not inaccurate to say that we talked about Rumsfeld," he continued. "I can understand why Bob would try to create a climate around these conversations." He added, however, that "there was no campaign, and I didn't go out and solicit others to back any view about getting rid of anyone. I could talk about these things with the president, and plant seeds, because there is a cadence to life in Washington and you raise these issues periodically."
Card acknowledged that he renewed the question of replacing Rumsfeld again earlier this year, but again insisted that it was not part of a specific effort to target the defense secretary for removal.
Woodward cites several instances where Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, criticized Rumsfeld to top U.S. officials.
On Friday, however, Maj. Chris Karns, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that Abizaid denies ever having made a remark to visitors in Qatar that Rumsfeld "doesn't have any credibility anymore" to make the case for the American strategy in Iraq.
"General Abizaid has nothing but the greatest respect for Mr. Rumsfeld," Karns said.
The book also recounts a recommendation by Blackwill, in September 2003 that an additional 40,000 troops were needed in Iraq. Blackwill, reached in Hawaii on Friday, refused to discussed his recommendation but said that Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were "always more than willing to give me as much time as I wanted to make my arguments."
It was unclear Friday whether Blackwill's view was passed on to the president.
The White House went to extra lengths to dispute Woodward's portrait of Bush as a president who viewed news from Iraq through the best possible lens and who failed to come to grips with reports of a deteriorating security situation.
"A couple of weeks ago, the president was being accused of trying to scare people," Snow told reporters. "Now, all of a sudden, he's accused of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Neither one is true."
A comparison of the memorandums that Woodward writes about — and others that have come to light, including a National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism and Iraq's role in inspiring terrorists that the White House declassified earlier this week — suggests a more complex picture. The memorandums and intelligence estimates clearly describe escalating terrorism, rising anti-Americanism, and the risks of failure in Iraq and beyond. Bush and Rice, among others, acknowledged the rising difficulties, but consistently expressed optimism about eventual victory.
In October 2005, for example, shortly after Zelikow's memo stating that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, Rice, in an interview with the BBC, referred to "a few violent men who can always wreak havoc, who can always grab the headlines, who can always kill innocent men, women and schoolchildren," but would not be drawn into predictions of how long the insurgency could go on.
Bush's record is similarly complex: In November he launched a series of speeches describing a "strategy for victory" in Iraq.
On Friday, Card defended those, saying "nothing is 100 percent, but in the case of Iraq failure is not an option."
The State Department also disputed a section of the book describing a meeting between George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and Rice on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. The book describes the meeting as a heated one in which Tenet hoped to "shake Rice" into developing covert and overt plans to stop Osama bin Laden from attacking.
But Rice and other State Department officials denied that was the case, noting that the report of the Sept. 11 commission, which had sworn testimony from Tenet and others at the meeting, made no mention of the July 10 encounter.
"The recollections as portrayed in the Woodward book in no way reflect the public and private testimony under oath of those individuals to the 9/11 commission," said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman.
NYT-09-29-06 2135EDT
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