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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (40127)	4/19/2004 8:24:57 PM
From: Brian Sullivan	Respond to of 793562

I won't point it out directly, but as reported here, Colin Powell utters a very bad double entendre in this interview. Maybe I should send it in to Wonkette... Powell disputes account of decision-making on Iraq war Secretary of state: 'I was included' in briefings cnn.com WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday disputed suggestions in a new book that he was kept out of the loop in decision-making before the Iraq war -- and was dragooned into going along with a policy he did not support. "When the president decided that we had to go down the road of military action, it was a road I knew was there all along, and I was as committed as anyone else to see the end of this regime," Powell told reporters. "My support was willing, and it was complete." However, Powell said he "will always plead guilty to being cautious about matters having to do with war and peace," and he confirmed journalist Bob Woodward's account that he warned President Bush before the war that the situation in post-war Iraq could prove difficult. "My obligation to the president, to the American people and to my colleagues on the National Security Council is to make sure that we all consider all of the options," he said. "I made sure the president understood -- and he did understand -- that it was going to be a difficult mission in the aftermath of the war." Powell also said he cooperated with Woodward -- at the behest of the White House. "We all talked to Woodward. It was part of our instructions from the White House," Powell said. "It was an opportunity to help him write a contemporary history of this period. It was no secret that all of us were encouraged to talk to Mr. Woodward. In my case, it was just a couple phone calls." In his book, "Plan of Attack," Woodward reports that Vice President Dick Cheney, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld briefed the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, on battle plans for the invasion of Iraq on January 11, 2003 -- shortly after Bush informed Rumsfeld that he had concluded military action against Iraq would be necessary. Two days later, Powell came to the White House for a meeting at which, according to Woodward, the president told his chief diplomat, "I really think I'm going to have to do this." But Powell said Monday that the impression left by those two events -- that Bandar was given information that was not being shared with the secretary of state -- is incorrect. "I was included in all of the military planning preparations. I was briefed on a regular basis," said Powell, a retired Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I was intimately familiar with the plan. I was aware that Prince Bandar was being briefed on the plan." 'Diplomatic work' Powell also said that at that meeting, Bush "did not convey to me" that he had made a final decision to invade Iraq. "He sent me back to do my diplomatic work," Powell said. Less than a month later, Powell appeared before the U.N. Security Council to make the Bush administration's case that Saddam's refusal to account for his weapons of mass destruction justified military action to remove him. No weapons have been found, and Powell later conceded that some of the information he used in his presentation was not "solid." Powell also disputed Woodward's contention that he and Cheney were so estranged by their differences over the war that they barely speak, insisting that his relationship with the vice president is "excellent." "When the vice president and I are alone, it's Colin and Dick," he said. In his book, Woodward describes Cheney as being one of the driving forces in favor of invading Iraq, to the point that Powell complained that the vice president, who was secretary of defense during the first Gulf War, seemed to have "fever" about deposing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Asked about that characterization, Powell said, "Was the vice president determined that we had to do something about Saddam Hussein and that evil regime? You bet he was." Woodward's book is based on interviews with 75 people involved in planning for the war, including Bush, who was the only source who spoke for attribution.

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (40127)	4/19/2004 8:50:30 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793562

Stop whimpering, we're in a battle By Mark Steyn (Filed: 20/04/2004) "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." I'm saving the end of the world for my final column, but T S Eliot's words seem at least as pertinent to the present war – or "war", according to taste. It will be decided not by the bangs – whether in Fallujah or Bali or elsewhere – but by the whimpers. And, although the bangs have got a little louder in recent weeks, it's the whimpers that have become deafening. Whimpers, whimpers everywhere. On American TV, the network sob-sisters tut sympathetically with the "Jersey Girls", four media-savvy 9/11 widows who've decided that metaphorically speaking George W Bush was at the controls of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Centre. Beltway reporters are a-twitter about the biennial doorstopper from The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, this time a huge book sourced up the wazoo portraying the President as a simpleton Christian avenger whose obsession with Iraq is a dark pathology as ingrained as paedophilia. For some reason, this is being portrayed as some kind of dramatic revelation rather than media conventional wisdom for the past three years – or, come to that, the President's openly stated position: judging from the Campaign 2000 press coverage, he more or less campaigned as a religious halfwit bent on toppling Saddam. Does anyone actually read Woodward's books? I know I've never finished one. But every cable news channel is pretending to be riveted by the change to some alleged "Gotcha!" moment on page 743. These days, the whimper of defeatism has several modulations. Sometimes it's a firm stand for some bogus principle, like that of Senor Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister who campaigned for office on a pledge to bring home his troops from Iraq unless the UN took over on June 30. Since then, Washington has agreed to let Kofi Annan's envoy put together the arrangements for the new transitional government. But Senor Zapatero has ordered the boys home anyway. Sometimes the defeatist whimper emerges as a cocky metropolitan sneer, like that of Rod Liddle in last week's Spectator, braying that Iraq was better off under Saddam. Sometimes it comes out as whiney narcissism, like that of the White House reporters at President Bush's press conference last week. Bush wasn't on good form. He was punchy and rambling. But no matter how bad he was, the press corps looked worse. I happened to watch the speech from the United States Naval Academy where I was taking part in their foreign affairs conference and I can tell you the questions I got from the midshipmen were a lot smarter than the ones the President got from the blow-dried blowhards. What do you think your biggest mistake was? Are you going to apologise to the American people? Do you think you'll lose the election? If you had to name the most pathetic loser to occupy the Presidency, would you have difficulty coming up with a name other than your own? Etc, etc. The biggest whimpers of all come from the 9/11 Commission. Have you been watching it? Me neither. But, when I catch the odd 10 minutes, I begin to feel as anti-American as Margaret Drabble and Harold Pinter. In its ghastly exhibitionist ersatz-legalism, it represents all the most malign features of American life. Tony Blair should have offered to loan Lord Hutton. Instead, a mélange of hacks and has-beens mugs for the cameras round the clock, and any piece of government paper from the summer of 2001 containing the words "plane" and/or "Muslim" is taken as evidence of Bush's complicity. In fact, the so-called incriminating memo is notable mainly for its confirmation of the woeful state of US intelligence. The mention of "media reports" in the first sentence is a sly admission that you could have found out all the stuff in this "classified" briefing by reading the papers. If you'd read a piece by Kenneth Timmerman in the July 1998 Reader's Digest, you'd have been much more informed. Bush would have been better off spending half an hour in a well-stocked dentist's waiting room than reading CIA briefings, and the ensuing root-canal surgery would have been a lot less painful than listening to the Commission poseurs. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that counter-intelligence was severely hobbled by the so-called "wall" erected between the CIA and FBI. Who put up this "wall", or at any rate extended it several feet higher than previously? Why, former Clinton-era Deputy Attorney-General Jamie Gorelick. Has she testified before the Commission? Well, no, because she's on it. That would seem to be a prima facie conflict of interest. But instead she's huffing indignantly about being a victim of "partisan rancor". "Partisan rancour" is wholly improper unless directed at Bush and Ashcroft. The other bombshell revelation from the hearings was trampled into oblivion in the stampede to Woodward's book and other flim-flam. Commissioner John Lehman remarked that "it was the policy [before 9/11] and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." In other words, when Mohammed Atta's five-man terrorist crew went to check in that morning at Boston, the airline would have been punished by the Federal Government if it had questioned more than two of them. And that still applies today. And, if you were to suggest changing that regulation, you'd be drowned in whimpers from the New York Times, the Democratic Party and the ethnic grievance industry. It's often said that the terrorists are only a "small minority" of Muslims. True. But, when it's well connected with everyone from the House of Saud to Pakistan's nuke maestro A Q Khan, a small minority can do a lot of damage. Likewise, the whimperers are only a minority of the American people, but they're even more plugged in – in the media, in politics, in the academy. The only relevant Vietnamese comparison is this: then as now, for America it's a choice between victory or self-defeat.

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (40127)	4/20/2004 7:38:45 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793562

But Woodward says the president told him he called Powell in for a brief 12-minute meeting and told him to put his ‘war uniform’ on. could it be put your other hat on and look at Iraq from the point of view we may have to go to war vs united nations convincing saddam to give up wmd? Woodward looked shock up on larry king last night. Powell did a job on him when explaining some details of his conversations and meeting vs Woodward interpretations. Saudi Prince called last night on larry king. Yes, we will try to keep prices down , i said that to Bush, but Clinton, Carter and the other presidents also all asked us to keep prices down. it is Saudi policy to try to keep prices low. There is no conspiracy between bush and Saudi on gasoline price for re-election. This comes up every presidential election and is a joke. These books are worst than the rumors and falsehoods that run throughout the Arab world. Oh, poll this morning printed in washington post shows Bush breaking away from Kerry.