Powell Says He Tried To Persuade Bush Not To Invade Iraq

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2042072.ece

Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”

He added: “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States.” All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put “a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew”.

The signs are that the views of Powell and other critics of the war are finally being heard in the Pentagon, if not yet in the White House. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is drawing up plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq in anticipation that General David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, will not be able to deliver an upbeat progress report in September on the American troop surge.

“It should come as no secret to anyone that there are discussions about what is a postsurge strategy,” said Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, last week.

The surge’s lack of demonstrable success is creating fissures in the Republican party as well as putting enormous pressure on the Democratic presidential candidates to favour a rapid pull-out, which Gates fears could leave Iraq in chaos.

New Mexico senator Pete Domenici became the third Republican senator in recent weeks to break ranks openly with Bush on the war. “We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress,” he said. “I am calling for a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path home.”

Speculation is growing that Gates will demonstrate his commitment to withdrawing US forces by moving a combat brigade of up to 3,000 troops out of Iraq as early as October and continuing to reduce their numbers month by month from their current strength of 160,000 to presurge levels of around 130,000 by the summer of 2008.

Gates believes American troop withdrawals are essential to building a cross-party consensus for retaining a presence in Iraq after Bush’s term in office expires. As a former director of the CIA who saw out the cold war in the early 1990s, he hopes to win the same bipartisan support for Iraq that President Harry Truman secured against the Soviet Union after the second world war.

The policy is likely to appeal to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who hopes to begin withdrawing more British troops from southern Iraq by the end of August.

A senior defence source said it would be possible to reduce the number of American forces to roughly 50,000-70,000 by election day in November 2008. “You are going to have to have some people left behind to provide stability and security for the country and take on the terrorists,” the source said.

The figures are similar to those floated by aides to Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, although she has been upping the rhetoric against remaining in Iraq in an effort to capture the support of party activists.

According to Powell, the US cannot “blow a whistle one morning” and have all American forces just leave. The former secretary of state has twice met Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, to advise him on foreign policy. Despite his antiwar stance, Obama supports a phased withdrawal that could leave a “significantly reduced force” in Iraq for “an extended period”.

Defence experts believe it will be impossible to maintain the surge’s high troop levels beyond February at the latest, given the need to rotate and refresh troops. Powell, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the early 1990s, said in Aspen that America’s volunteer army was already overstretched. He predicted that Bush would be forced to “face the situation on the ground” and alter course by the end of this year.

Supporters of the surge believe this could send a disastrous signal to the Iraqis. “If we pull out, if we stop this operation now, we will hand Al-Qaeda a terrific victory,” said Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute and an early advocate of the policy.

“The Iraqi government, right now, is a terrific ally in the war on terror. There have been more Iraqis killed fighting Al-Qaeda than in any other nation of the world. The question is, are we going to stand by them?”

The same political fault line runs through the White House between Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office and the State Department � now run by Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor � as it did at the start of the Iraq war. Bush has not yet thrown his weight definitively behind one side or the other, but the key difference this time is that the defence secretary is one of the “realists”.

According to Powell: “We have to face the reality of the situation that is on the ground and not what we would want it to be.” He believes that, even if the military surge has been a partial success in areas such as Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have turned on Al-Qaeda, it has not been accompanied by the vital political and economic “surge” and reconciliation process promised by the Iraqi government.

Al-Qaeda, Powell asserted, was only 10% of the problem in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, its prime minister, lacked the political will to establish an effective government. After a promising start to the surge at the beginning of the year, 453 unidentified corpses were found on the streets of Baghdad last month, 41% more than the 321 bodies found in January, according to unofficial Iraqi health ministry statistics.

The military gains could prove as fleeting in Anbar as Baghdad. American officers in Iraq believe Al-Qaeda strengthened its hold on the Sunni-dominated region in 2005, when responsibility for security was shifted prematurely to Iraqi forces that were led by Shi’ites and proved incapable of providing protection.

Powell believes that a reduction in US forces will have to be accompanied by talks with Syria and Iran. “You have to talk to the people you dislike most in this dangerous world.”

The general and former joint chiefs of staff added: “Shi’ites will ultimately prevail because they are 60% of the population and their militias can be pretty violent. They will prevail also because they are determined not to be ruled again by the Sunnis.

“The Sunnis are struggling for power and survival and it’s going to be resolved by a test of arms. It’s going to be very ugly.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free

Some Interesting Insights: The NeoCon Warmongers

Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly has a great recap of what former Pentagon spy-master Pat Lang and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson had to say at a University of District of Columbia forum on May 7th.

Here's some Feith fun from Pat Lang:

Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon's worldwide spying operations.

In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon's office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department's number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government's national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

"He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me," Lang recalled, "which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers -- they always had briefing papers, you know -- about me.

"He's looking at this stuff, and he says, 'I've heard of you. I heard of you.'

"He says, 'Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?'

"And I said, 'Yeah, that's really true.'

"That's too bad," Feith said.

The audience howled.

"That was the end of the interview," Lang said. "I'm not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out."

Feith, of course, like the administration's other Israel-connected hawks, didn't want "Arabists" like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where -- according to the Bush administration theory -- overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.

And some Lang on Wolfowitz:

"I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him -- this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, 'You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.'

"He said, 'Why?'

I said, 'For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They're going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there's going to be a massive insurgency.'"

"He said, 'No, no, they'll be glad to see us,'"

Lang continued. "This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.'

No, Lang told Wolfowitz, "that's not gonna happen. It's just an impossibility. They're not like that. They don't want to be us."

Not everyone agrees with all of Lang's views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful.
How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war?

And Lawrence Wilkerson on Tenet and "Curveball":

Wilkerson provides a damning clue.

In February 2003, Powell's top aide relates, he "spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face" of George Tenet, Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency's headquarters at Langley.

It was the eve of Powell's now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq's alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs.

"One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was 'multiple sources.' We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we're putting in the testimony," Wilkerson said.

"That was the going-in position."

Subsequently, he learned that there was but "a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual's testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State."
Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar.

"None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet," Wilkerson said.

Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball.

As readers of this column know , however, Tenet's chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet's deputies.

Both can't be right.

"Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth," Wilkerson says, "with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell's presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories."

We're waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer.

Lots of people are dying because of the errors and idiocy perpetrated by Feith, Wolfowitz and yes, Tenet too.

-- Steve Clemons

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free

Tenet Lambastes Cheney in New Book

April 27, 2007
Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI


WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

(Well, of course there weren't any discussions about containment or anything else other than invasion and occupation. They had been planning this for years.)

Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

(Mr. Tenet, has it ever occured to you that the Clinton hating Bush White House, kept two people from the Clinton White House on: you and Norman Minetta? Why would they do that?

Who got most of the blame for 9/11? The CIA and the FAA, one department run by you, the other, under Minetta.

It stands to reason that you would be scapegoated for Iraq as well, that is one of the reasons you were kept on after 9/11. You were going to serve as a scape goat, one way or the other.


Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

(Nobody wanted to hear the truth, it didn't fit their plans!)

Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.

(Hey George, have you never thought it odd that George W. Bush, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to get into the White House, acted like he had no idea what to do once he got there. He seemed rather lazy, as I recall; fairly bored and unfocused.

He wanted tax breaks.

He got them. Given that there was a surplus, not many peoplle were going to throw a fit about that.

He launched "No Child Left Behind," with the help of Ted Kennedy, then did little to fund the program.

He was headed for one term.

Until 9/11.

After that, it was as if he had been launched, like a unguided missle.

The attack by Al Qaeda on Manhattan, if that was indeed what happened, could not have come as a surprise to Bush, Cheney, Rice or you. Isn't that right? But you got the blame, nevertheless. Still George W Bush defended you and kept you on, as CIA Director. That really indebted you to him, right?

Think, George!

But Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

Oh ferchrissake, they were focused on Iraq before the Supremes put them in office!

Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”

“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.

(The hell he hasn't said this. He still says it!)

Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.

He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called “a lively debate” on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.

“In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.”

Surely, you have heard of good cop/bad cop?

He writes that the controversy over who was to blame for the State of the Union error was the beginning of the end of his tenure. After the finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., he wrote, “My relationship with the administration was forever changed.”

No it wasn't. It just became obvious that you were going to be the fall guy, and this had been planned all along.

Mr. Tenet also says in the book that he had been “not at all sure I wanted to accept” the Medal of Freedom. He agreed after he saw that the citation “was all about the C.I.A.’s work against terrorism, not Iraq.”

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.

He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.

During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.
“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”

Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.

Asked about Mr. Tenet’s assertions, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, defended the prewar deliberations on Thursday. “The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s own actions, and only after a thorough and lengthy assessment of all available information as well as Congressional authorization,” the spokesman said.

(Bullshit!)

The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.

(Well, of course they did. No Bushite had any interest in stopping the event they had long hoped for; a newPearl Harbor. As a matter of fact, they probably encouraged it.

“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Mr. Tenet confesses to “a black, black time” two months after the 2001 attacks when, sitting in front of his house in his favorite Adirondack chair, he “just lost it.”

“I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since,” he writes. “What am I doing here? Why me?” Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.

Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”

(Yeah, I have to admit, that has puzzled me too. A few well placed bombs in several Walmarts could have broken the economy fast. But no such attacks ever came. I wonder why?)

“I do know one thing in my gut,” he writes. “Al Qaeda is here and waiting.”

(Waiting for what, exactly? Instructions? From Whom?)

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free