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Re: New Yorker’s
Annals of National Security: Who lied to whom? http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1 John, thanks
for sharing this. NBC online
carried this story today out of the Financial Times with another angle. I’m having déjà vu moments from
Watergate and Iran-Contragate already.
Okay, okay. No more coffee.
- KWC How
long has war been in the cards? @ http://www.msnbc.com/news/891595_asp.htm?0cv=CB10 Gen. Franks indicates preparation under way
for a year By Stephen Fidler March
27 — Did Tommy Franks, the chief of Central
Command, let the cat out of the bag? There was some anxiety at the White House
that, during his first press conference of the Iraq military campaign, Gen.
Franks may have been a little too, well, frank. The controversial question the general unwittingly addressed was this:
When did George W. Bush decide to go to war? The more evidence there is that
Mr. Bush decided to go to war early, the more ammunition for those who say his
decision to go to the UN was little more than a charade. The awkward suggestion that the decision was made early has already
surfaced in some U.S. magazines. Time
magazine reports that the president poked his head into the office of
Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, in March 2002 and told three senators
sitting there: ”[Expletive deleted] Saddam. We’re taking him out.” Richard Haass, policy planning chief at the
State Department, said he first realized in the first week of July that war was
coming, according to the New Yorker. In a conversation with Ms. Rice about
whether it was wise to put Iraq front and center of U.S. policy: “She said,
essentially, that the decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath,” he was
reported as saying. Now Tommy Franks jumps in. Asked on
Saturday whether there had been any surprises in the campaign to date, he said:
“Actually, there have been no surprises in the way that you asked the question.
One is surprised, I think, when one has not had a year to think through the
possibilities. “Much has been said and written about this business of [whether] one
plan [is] good enough and another not, and so forth. And the fact of the matter
is that for a period of about a year, a great deal of intense planning and a
great deal of what-iffing by all of us has gone into this so that we prepare
ourselves and prepare our subordinates in a way that we minimize the number of
surprises. There will be surprises, but we have not yet seen them.” So, it looks like Gen. Franks and his colleagues were thinking
seriously about an invasion last March. Of course, the military is always
making plans, and the existence of a military plan does not mean a political
decision has been made to go to war. But the discomfiture at the White House
suggests there may be more to it than that. As time passes, the decision to have looked for a second United Nations
Security Council resolution to back the use of force in Iraq looks worse and
worse. U.S. officials have already made plain that Washington’s decision to
seek the second resolution was taken for one reason only: because Tony Blair
said he needed it. Hardliners in the Bush administration opposed the decision and chafed
at it afterwards, arguing that it was not legally necessary. It now emerges
that, in this respect at least, they had allies in an unexpected
quarter: Paris. Not only that, France’s ambassador to Washington, Jean-David
Levitte, urged the U.S. not to go forward with the second resolution. “Weeks before it was tabled, I went to the State department and to the
White House to say: ‘Don’t do it,’” he told a crowded meeting organized in
Washington by the Council on Foreign Relations. He gave two reasons: “You will
split the council and you don’t need it.” Some things don’t change. Watching U.S. television weather forecasters
using maps of the Middle East to explain to viewers the meteorological causes
of sandstorms brings to mind the observation of the journalist Ambrose Bierce:
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Bierce died in 1914. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list |
