Oval Office failure
By Scot Lehigh
April 23, 2004
BOB WOODWARD'S best Oval Office anecdote is telling. And yet, more revealing still is what doesn't take place in "Plan of Attack," Woodward's detailed new book about the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq.
According to Woodward, on Dec. 21, 2002, George Tenet, the CIA director, and John McLaughlin, his deputy, went to the Oval Office to run through the CIA's presentation making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. When it was done, George W. Bush had a quizzical look on his face.
" `Nice try,' Bush said. "I don't think this is quite -- it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.' " Chief of staff Andrew Card, too, was underwhelmed, "worried that there might be no `there there.' "
The president then turned to Tenet and asked: "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?" Tenet, Woodward writes, "rose up, threw his arms in the air. `It's a slam dunk case' . . . Bush pressed. `George, how confident are you?' "
Tenet: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk."
What we have, then, is a president who, with the critical decision on war pressing hard upon him, had gotten a look at the CIA's evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and found himself somewhat dubious about the agency's case.
So here's the question: Where was the gimlet-eyed follow-up, the hard-nosed executive evaluation, the painstaking dissection of the evidence that any commander in chief should insist upon before deciding on war?
There's precious little evidence of that in Woodward's book. Indeed, the picture that emerges is of a president less concerned with flyspecking the intelligence in determined pursuit of the truth than with making the strongest possible case to the world that Iraq had WMD.
...contd. boston.com |
