PLAN OF ... SALES
By JOHN PODHORETZ - NY Post
April 21, 2004 -- <font size=4>BOB Woodward has misled the nation! In the run-up to the publication of his new book, "Plan of Attack," he sexed up his own intelligence findings! Quick, convene a panel at the Columbia Journalism School!
How did Woodward deceive the audience of "60 Minutes" and the entire press corps? He made people believe "Plan of Attack" rivaled Richard Clarke's bestseller in Bush-bashing - by pulling out a few isolated sentences from the book's endless 465 pages to make it appear as though "Plan" were a startling indictment of the war in Iraq.
"Plan of Attack" is indeed a startling book - startling
because it offers a persuasive portrait of an
extraordinarily serious Bush administration and the 17-
month process that led to the war.
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Woodward and his publisher (Simon & Schuster) clearly
looked at the best-seller list and determined that the
best way to sell the book was to appeal to the hate-Bush
crowd. If the prevailing winds of best-sellerdom had been
in the president's favor, they would have spun the book
the other way - and that would have been far more
representative of the book's own revelations.
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In other words, their spin is a lie! A damnable lie!
Paging Al Franken, David Corn, Joe Conason, Eric Alterman
and all those on the left who like to dissect lies.
If the Air America talk-show hosts and their ilk actually
do plow through the 465 pages of "Plan of Attack" (which
is a fate I would actually wish on them, because reading
Woodward's sludge-like prose is an agonizing experience on
a par with being forced to read a 465-page stereo-assembly
manual), they are bound not only to be disappointed, but
enraged at the way it explodes the myths and reveals the
distortions they have been trying to foist on the American
people.
This comes through most clearly in the sections about
Iraq's missing or destroyed weapons of mass destruction.
The conviction that Saddam possessed stockpiles of those
weapons and was prepared to use them pervades and
permeates the book. No honest person could come away
from "Plan of Attack" thinking that George W. Bush didn't
believe the weapons existed.
What Woodward reveals in detail for the first time is that
the presumption in all the ultra-top-secret military was
that Iraq possessed the weapons, that extraordinary
efforts had to be taken to destroy the sites where they
might be stored and that American troops needed to be
protected from their battlefield use.
As Gen. Tommy Franks began devising his stunningly innovative "plan of attack" in late 2001 - and Woodward's signal accomplishment here is uncovering the remarkable give-and-take between Franks and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that gave shape to that plan - he determined the military would have to go after Saddam and his sons first, the structure protecting them second and "weapons-of-mass-destruction infrastructure " third.
It is axiomatic that the military would not have devoted
so much of its planning and worry to WMDs if the U.S.
government had not believed in their existence.
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Indeed, Woodward makes some major news on the "lies about
weapons of mass destruction" issue. But the liar in
question isn't President Bush - it was chief U.N. weapons
inspector Hans Blix.
Woodward reveals that "intelligence indicated that Blix
was not reporting everything and not doing all the things
he maintained he was doing. Some of the principals
believed that Blix was a liar." Only weeks after the
inspections process began, Blix went on a holiday vacation
around Christmas time.
At the time of Blix's first report to the Security Council
in January 2003, "Intelligence showed that Blix did not
want his inspectors to be the reason for war and that he
feared . . . [he] had almost handed the U.S. a casus
belli. As a result, Blix was planning to back off in his
next report."
Which is exactly what he did.
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The book offers no answer to the questions about the
missing WMDs. It does point out that the administration's
satellite photographs spotted all kinds of movement around
weapons sites before, during and after the inspections -
and that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was the source
for the intelligence that "there are mobile labs for
biological weapons."
But the weight of the evidence spoke inarguably to
Saddam's possession of serious quantities of WMDs and
serious programs to increase its stockpiles. We haven't
found the existing WMDs, but we have found the evidence of
increased program activity.
One last point about how Woodward sexed up his own
reporting to sell books on "60 Minutes": John Kerry and
others have gone berserk condemning the administration's
supposed secret deal with Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador,
Prince Bandar, to keep oil prices low this year for the
purpose of getting Bush reelected.
"Woodward told us that Bandar has promised the president
that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months
before the election to ensure the U.S. economy is strong
on Election Day," Mike Wallace said on "60 Minutes."
"That's the Saudi pledge," Woodward told Wallace.
The source of this tale can be found on page 324 of "Plan
of Attack." It begins with a conversation between Bush and
Bandar. Bush expresses worry about the "adequacy of the
oil market," and "asked about the excess production
capacity" in Saudi Arabia. "According to Prince Bandar,"
Woodward writes, "the Saudis hoped to fine-tune oil prices
over 10 months to prime the economy for 2004."
Woodward's writing is so bad that it's hard to make this out, but there's no "pledge" in here. Bandar clearly told Woodward something about lowering oil prices, which he appended to a report about a conversation between Bush and Bandar about oil supplies during the war in Iraq.
But it sure sounds bad. And given that "Plan of Attack" generally makes Bush sound pretty good, Woodward had to do something. He just couldn't bear being outsold by Richard Clarke. So what if he distorted the contents of his own book? He knows perfectly well that nobody actually reads him.
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NEW YORK POST |
