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Plan of Attack
By Bob Woodward
“The intellectual
godfather…for toppling Saddam was Paul Wolfowitz, the
deputy secretary of defense.”
“Wolfowitz
had edgy, hawkish views.
[His]… reasons for getting rid of Saddam
were: It was necessary and it would be relatively easy.”
“Wolfowitz
believed it was possible to send in the military to overrun
and seize Iraq’s …oil fields…and establish a
foothold.”
“Powell
thought that Wolfowitz was talking as if 25 million Iraqis
would rush to the side of the U.S….”
“…it
was one of the most absurd, strategically unsound proposals
he had ever heard.”
“…Powell,
shaking his head, kept saying, ‘This is lunacy.’”
“…Wolfowitz
was like a drum that would not stop.
He
and his group of neoconservatives were rubbing their hands
over the ideas….”
*
* *
“The
CIA message was…sobering, highly unusual in its judgment
…
it
could not do the job.”
“‘Could
we do the job by covert means?’ the president asked.”
“The
answer was no.”
“When
Powell was told all this,
he
concluded that the CIA just didn’t want another
fuck-up.”
*
* *
“…TIME
Magazine had done what appeared to be a White House –
sanctioned cover story designed to knock Powell down a
notch….”
“The
article asserted that Powell was isolated,
out
of step with administration hard-liners who were setting the
direction
in
foreign policy.”
“Powell
asked Richard N. Haass, a Republican foreign policy
moderate…
what
he thought of the … article.”
“‘It
sucks,’ Haass said.
“‘The
only thing that would have been worse would have been if it
had showed you were in charge.
Then you would have been totally fucked.’”
“Powell
burst out with a loud laugh.”
*
* *
“‘I
want you to do it,’ [present the case for war to the
U.N. Security Council] Bush told the secretary of state.
‘You
have the credibility to do it.’
“Powell
was flattered to be asked to do what no one else could.”
*
* *
“On…January
27, Hans Blix gave a tough but balanced report to the U.N.
Security Council….”
“Mohamed
ElBaradei…said, ‘We have to date found no evidence that
Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program since its
elimination of the program in the 1990s.’”
“Well-placed
officials in the administration were skeptical about WMD
intelligence on Iraq – among them Armitage….
This
skepticism apparently did not make it in any convincing form
to the president. The
unambiguous pronouncements of the heavyweights Tenet, Cheney
and Rumsfeld prevailed.”
*
* *
“At
a private meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi…the president…stated…
‘Iraq
would be disarmed and Saddam would not be allowed to stay in
power.’
‘We
have put together a lethal military, and we will kick his
ass.’”
*
* *
“‘Holly
Shit!’ Powell said to himself as he read a copy of
Tenet’s speech.
…The
CIA director [was] saying that the aluminum tubes
they had previously been so confident were for use as
centrifuges for enriching uranium were possibly for regular
artillery shells.’”
“Powell
let out another holy shit!”
“He
knew very well that Tenet had told the president ‘in brash
New York language,’ as Powell once put it, that the case
on WMD was a ‘slam dunk.’”
*
*
*
“Bush
smiled.”
“‘History,’
he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets,
extending
his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it
was so far off,
‘We
won’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”
*
* *
*
*
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