SMH : White House tries to paper over the cracks

White House tries to paper over the cracks

David Sanger in Washington | October 2, 2006

THE White House has tried to dismiss a new book's portrayal of division and discord inside the Bush Administration, suggesting that the account by the investigative reporter Bob Woodward was provided by former aides aggrieved that their advice on troop levels and strategy had been ignored.

On Saturday the White House issued a document titled "Five Key Myths in Bob Woodward's Book", disputing, among other things, the idea that President George Bush was not being honest with Americans about Iraq. It cited speeches over the past year in which Mr Bush acknowledged problems. It also said Laura Bush's office had denied she pushed for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to be sacked.

The book, State of Denial, which is to be released today, describes clashes and long-running feuds fuelled by the debate over the unravelling of the war in Iraq.

Asked about its contents by reporters travelling with him to a NATO meeting in Slovenia, Mr Rumsfeld said he had not read it - nor Woodward's previous books on the Iraq war.

But other White House officials, speaking off the record, acknowledged that the book reflected a breakdown of discipline in an Administration that once prized its ability to keep its disputes in house.

The book details how Mr Rumsfeld alienated key figures throughout the Government and military: the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, complained that Mr Rumsfeld would not return her telephone calls, forcing Mr Bush to intervene personally.

Mr Rumsfeld rebuffed the former chief of staff, Andrew Card, when he conveyed Mr Bush's order to send National Guard troops to Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 until hearing from the President himself. General John Abizaid, the senior US commander in the Middle East, concluded that "Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore".

The White House spokesman Tony Snow said at a Washington briefing: "In a lot of ways, the book is sort of like cotton candy - it kind of melts on contact."

But he had difficulty explaining why Mr Bush had failed to listen to such a broad range of officials who called for more troops, including Robert Blackwill, the former senior security adviser on Iraq, and the former administrator there, Paul Bremer.

Mr Snow was also unable to explain why Mr Bush's optimistic assessments of the US's "Plan for Victory" in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches he gave late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified communications written by Administration officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.

Some of those memorandums were written by Philip Zelikow, an adviser to Dr Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Dr Zelikow characterised the country as still "a failed state" two years after the US-led invasion. In another memorandum in September 2005 he said there was only a 70 per cent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state.

Meanwhile, a biography of Colin Powell to be released next week suggests that as head of the joint chiefs of staff he also tried unsuccessfully to impress on Mr Bush the dangers he saw the US facing in Iraq.

The New York Times, The Washington Post