Bob Woodward’s front page story for Sunday’s Washington Post is online now. Lots of bombshells about the Bush Administration’s campaign to deceive the American public about conditions on the ground in Iraq — and why they are doing it (hint: Henry Kissinger is advising them).
Here’s an excerpt from the end of the article about Bush’s former chief of staff, Andrew Card, and his private doubts about the prospects of success in the war after he had tried unsuccessfully to have Sec. of Defens Donald Rumsfeld fired. No bombshells here but apparently some confirmation of what we all suspect — that Bush is stubbornly following the wrong course of action, despite the better judgment of smarter people:
[In March of this year], White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. prepared to leave the administration after submitting his resignation to Bush. He felt a sense of relief mixed with the knowledge that he was leaving unfinished business.
“It’s Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” Card had told his replacement, Joshua B. Bolten. “Then comes the economy.”
One of Card’s great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. In March, there were 58,249 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of Kissinger’s private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered.
As best Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of “What could we do differently?” But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying “Let’s examine alternatives,” as had surfaced after the Vietnam era.
Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president “It’s not worth it” or “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.”
Card was enough of a realist to see that two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.
But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.
He was leaving. And the man most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
