60 Minutes interviews Bob Woodward.
Woodward paints an interesting picture of the run-up to war. The president actually comes off looking better than most people around him, and that's not a big surprise. Bush is portrayed as being skeptical of the intelligence on WMD and hesitating to decide to invade, even though he had been talking about it since a few days after 9/11.
George Tenet, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are the real hawks here, the guys who started saying the intelligence was a "slam dunk" (Tenet) and that Saddam definitely possessed WMD (Cheney). Cheney is particularly shown to be completely obsessed with Saddam from the very start.
The big stories are:
- The $700 million taken from an Afghan War appropriation to fund the build up for Iraq. Congress was never consulted. Illegal.
- General Tommy Franks lied outright about the preparations for war, saying he had not been told to make a plan when he had been planning it for months.
- The Saudi Ambassador was briefed on the decision to go to war before Colin Powell
- The Saudis have promised Bush that they will lower oil prices shortly before the November election to give the president a boost.(!!)
Condi the Liar is already denying some of Woodward's claims, particularly that the decision to go to war was made in January of '03, not in March, as the administration has said.
According to Rice, "He [the president] said, 'No, I think we probably are going to have to go to war. We're going to have to go to war.' And it was not a decision to go to war. That decision he made in March, when he finally decided to do that."
So what she's saying here is that saying "We're going to have to go to war" is not a decision to go to war. The decision to go to war can only technically be said to have been made when the first soldier starts moving towards Baghdad, I suppose. Her logic seems to be that as long as there is still the possibility of changing your mind, you have not made a decision. Ridiculous. Again the administration's spokesliar is splitting hairs any reasonable person would find unsplittable.
It all depends on what your definition of the word "decision" is.
