The real reason George Bush went to war
April 24, 2004
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You may have thought the President had a secret agenda when he invaded
Iraq. He didn't, writes Richard Cohen.
Old joke: A man repeatedly rides a bike across the Mexican-United
States border. Each time, he's stopped by customs and the bike is
taken apart. Nothing is found. Finally, one day a customs official
offers the man immunity from prosecution if only he will tell what
he's smuggling. The man pauses for a second, shrugs and says,
"Bicycles."
I offer you this because I have just finished Bob Woodward's
compelling new book on the Iraq war, Plan of Attack, and while it
contains several gasps per chapter - more reasons why CIA director
George Tenet should be fired, more proof that Condi Rice is in over
her head and more reasons that ***** Cheney should be medicated - the
stunning disclosure that I expected is simply not there.
I thought Woodward would reveal the real reason George Bush went to
war in Iraq. But it turns out we already knew.
The "bicycle" in this case has been in plain sight: Bush's conviction
that he is a servant of God and history, chosen to liberate Iraq,
bring democracy to the Middle East and make sure the United States is
safe from terrorism.
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In the two lengthy on-the-record interviews the President granted
Woodward, he makes it abundantly clear that, somehow, this is all one
package in his mind - even though to others, Saddam Hussein posed no
danger to America at all. Among other things, he had no links to
al-Qaeda and apparently had no weapons of mass destruction.
For a while, though, Bush was entitled to think otherwise about the
weapons, because, among other reasons, the CIA director had assured
him of their existence. "It's a slam-dunk case!" Tenet told the
President - and then, for emphasis, repeated his assurance: "Don't
worry, it's a slam dunk!"
For Bush, who surprisingly had some doubts about Iraq's WMD
capabilities, Tenet's firmness was impressive. "That was very
important," Woodward quotes him as saying.
But as Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in an
amazingly candid interview, Saddam's purported arsenal was almost
beside the point - not the prime reason for going to war. The real
reason, as Woodward's book makes clear, was the President's conviction
that he was in an epochal fight against evil and had the historic
opportunity to reorder the Middle East.
I confess that I have both known this and not known this. It has been
apparent for some time but a little hard to comprehend. Possibly, I
and others thought, there was another reason - like evening the score
for Saddam's attempt to kill Bush's father or to finish the Gulf War,
which had ended unsatisfactorily. After all, the intent to go to war
had seemed to arise out of nowhere - a mere 72 days after the
September 11 terrorist attacks. Where had it come from?
My guess is Cheney. The Bush-Cheney relationship remains as sealed as
the one between Bush and his wife. Woodward seems to have been a fly
on the White House wall, but we learn little about what Bush and
Cheney discussed when they were not in formal meetings.
We do know, though, that Colin Powell considered Cheney obsessed with
Iraq and so determined to make the case for war that the
Vice-President exaggerated the threat and in some cases - this is me
talking now - just plain lied.
Whatever the case, the real news in this engrossing book is not
exactly what Bush says but that he says it at all - and sometimes,
surprisingly, both articulately and with some erudition. Here is a man
convinced that he did the right thing, convinced - despite contrary
evidence - that there was some sort of link between Saddam and
terrorism and that, as he told Mexican President Vicente Fox, "The
security of the United States is on the line."
This is what Bush said on the eve of the war and what, presumably, he
still believes.
When Woodward asked him last December what his reaction had been to
Powell's private warning that things could go bad in postwar Iraq,
Bush said: "And my reaction to that is, is that my job is to secure
America. And that I also believe that freedom is something people long
for. And that if given the chance, the Iraqis over time would seize
the moment. My frame of mind is focused on what I told you - the
solemn duty to protect America."
Those, though, were not the aims Powell had questioned. Rather, he had
talked about the difficulties of implementing them in an ethnically
fractured land where democracy was historically unknown. Bush simply
ignored all that, because essentially he believed what he believed.
"I sat there somewhat nonplussed," Woodward wrote.
He had uncovered the bicycle.
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