The hazards of secrets.
<font color=darkgreen> US President George W. Bush secretly ordered a war plan be drawn up against Iraq less than two months after US forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furore he did not tell everyone on his national security team, according to a new book on his Iraq policy.
news.com.au
"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as telling Woodward.
"It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."</font>
This is so telling. Bush says he was not anxious to go to war, and yet he would not tell his plans to anyone who might talk him out of it. Bush deceives himself.
At this time I think Bush's heart was in the right place. He was getting a double-dose of Cheney and Rumsfeld's uninformed frustrations that history didn't stop on VJ day. They all had a vision of a shining, leading America that they didn't want anyone to intrude on their fantasy, so they instituted a don't ask don't tell policy about unilateral invasion.
Had there been a debate, in the military, pentagon and the country as a whole, they might have realized that there were just a few flaws in their plan. Flaws that were scoffed at when voiced. They bitterly attacked anyone who pointed out that their fantasy was more like a Justice League of America comic than a history book. And so it failed.
And when it began to unravel, and Rumsfeld couldn't face the idea that the things that might go wrong did, and the things that should have gone right did not. His crafty secretive mind lept to the natural conclusion, the Iraqi's were beating him because they had better, more secret secrets than he. If only he could find out things, like the name of the small group of dead-enders, or the secret weapon bunker, or the location of the Arc of the Covenent, or whatever secret they had that was better than his secrets. So he authorized people to do whatever was necessary to talk, to tell the secrets.
The first secrets were held from the American people. The last were, I think, held from Bush himself. Oh, they told him alright, but not in a way he would understand. They probably then launched into a vigorous debate on judges or stem cells right after they told him. Some people, after all, can be fooled all of the time.
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