Woodward and other bad news for the Republicans

Bob Woodward is a once-revered icon of the Washington journalism establishment. Back in the 1970s, he and Carl Bernstein helped to break the story of the involvement of the Nixon White House in the Watergate break-in. Earlier in the G.W. Bush presidency, Woodward had two very laudatory and insider-y books about the Bush administration, which portrayed Bush as a decisive, etc “great strategic thinker” (ha-ha-ha), though they did also reveal some pretty interesting details about how decisions were getting made inside the GWB White House.
Now the tide has turned on the Bush presidency. And if we need any more proof of this, it can lie in the fact that Woodward has been cutting his losses– i.e., saying “to heck with continuing to kiss butt in order to get good access, let’s tell some truth round here!” That, at least, seems to be the big message about his latest book, due out Monday.
However, the NYT’s David Sanger managed to buy an early copy and wrote about it in Friday’s paper, with a follow-up piece in Saturday’s paper.
In addition, Woodward has taped an interview for CBS’s program “60 Minutes”, and some excerpts of that were made available today.
Highlights from what Sanger wrote in today’s NYT:

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser [Robert Blackwill] who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war. [Gosh, sounds a lot like Israel today, don’t you think? ~HC]
… Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
… Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

In Saturday’s paper Sanger writes that White House spokesman Tony Snow tried to rebut some of the book’s main findings. But Sanger notes that Snow did not explain,

why Mr. Bush’s upbeat assessments of a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified memorandums written by officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.
Some of those memorandums were written by Philip D. Zelikow, a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Mr. Zelikow characterized Iraq as “a failed state” two years after the invasion, and another in September 2005, in which he said there was a 70 percent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state. That meant, Mr. Zelikow said, that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, including what he called a “significant risk” of “catastrophic failure,” meaning a collapse of the state Mr. Bush has tried to create.

In the CBS News interview, Woodward told interviewer Mike Wallace that,

the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, as an adviser. [Kissinger???? See here. ~HC] Says Woodward, “Now what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'” Woodward adds. “This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”
President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney [his dog] are the only ones supporting me.”

That, though, as Woodward also told Wallace,

insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” says Woodward.
The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,'”

I am really glad this book is coming out in the run-up to the elections. In conjunction with the still-unfolding news about the involvement of sleazeball lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s many contacts with the White House and today’s abrupt resignation of Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley after revelations that he’d sent some highly improper instant messages to male teenagers working as “pages” in Congress, it’s been a bad news day all round for the Republicans.
(Even sleazier: Foley was chair of something called the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus and had recently introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He was also a deputy whip for the GOP. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.)