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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. T. who wrote (637036)	10/3/2004 9:39:09 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Do you mean "Bush at War"? Your characterization does not dovetail with my recollections of excerpts from that book (I take The Post), and I just read a couple of reviews on Amazon, neither of which mention your points, so permit me to be skeptical.........

To: E. T. who wrote (637036)	10/3/2004 9:58:45 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 769670

It occurred to me that you probably meant "Plan of Attack". Here are some reviews: 1.Foreign Affairs Woodward, who has become the court chronicler of the Bush administration, provides in Plan of Attack a much better book than the first in the series, Bush at War. One reason is that the divisions at court have become sharper. Another is that Woodward was in as good a position as anybody else to address the two central puzzles about Bush's approach to Iraq: Did he realize, first, that he was going to war on the basis of dubious intelligence and, second, that running post-Saddam Iraq would be so difficult and dangerous? Addressing the first question, Woodward suggests that Bush never doubted that weapons of mass destruction were there; the best that can be said on the second is that the main players were so preoccupied with arguing the case for war that they failed to attend to the issues of occupation. Woodward's methods-relying on interviews and occasional media references, with little historical perspective or analysis-remain flawed. Nonetheless, the readiness of key players to talk freely with him at a time when the quality of their judgments had yet to be tested ensures an account that rings true throughout. search.barnesandnoble.com 2.From The Washington Post's Book World Woodward casts interesting light on what in hindsight has clearly emerged as the greatest political blunder of the administration's war strategy so far -- pinning so much of the public case for war on what increasingly seem to be vastly overblown estimates of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs (WMD) under Saddam. Here the inquest exculpates the president and the White House war hawks from cooking the evidence; it is CIA director George Tenet who overwhelms Bush's questions about WMD by calling the case for WMD "a slam dunk." It is not quite clear whether WMD became the central pillar of the public case for war because the administration thought that this threat was the most politically persuasive or because this threat was, in fact, the driving force in the administration's own thinking. amazon.com