"A touch of Hollywood machismo and an obsessive presidency set an inevitable course for war."
smh.com.au
<<...While there is a sympathetic tone to Woodward's portrait of the President, Bush emerges as vain rather than confident, a man whose major concern is to show he has "cojones". Yet his self-confidence is so frail that Brent Scowcroft, his father's former national security adviser, largely shut up in public after cautioning of the risks of war - not because he changed his view but because he and Bush senior did not want to injure the son's self-confidence.
Woodward acquits Bush of cynicism and accepts his genuine ambition to set up Iraq as a democratic, Israel-friendly example to the Arab world. Bush, Woodward reports, acquired after September 11, 2001, an almost grandiose purpose - a commitment for the US to improve the world.
Nevertheless, Woodward lays bare the contradiction in this simplistic policy - the astounding official and Bush family intimacy with the feudal autocracy of Saudi Arabia, the corrupting of Jordan by the CIA, the dumping of hundreds of millions of dollars among the Kurds to buy their intelligence and armed support while lying to them about US intentions, the distortion of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the deception of the American public...>> |
