-->Besprechung heute in den NYT:


A Heady Mix of Pride and Prejudice Led to War
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: April 19, 2004

In his engrossing new book,"Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward uses myriad details to chart the Bush administration's march to war against Iraq. His often harrowing narrative not only illuminates the fateful interplay of personality and policy among administration hawks and doves, but it also underscores the role that fuzzy intelligence, Pentagon timetables and aggressive ideas about military and foreign policy had in creating momentum for war.

(...)

"Plan of Attack" reveals that President George W. Bush asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001, to start a war plan for Iraq, and to do so in secret because a leak could trigger"enormous international angst and domestic speculation." Among the first to express angst was Gen. Tommy Franks, who got the Iraq assignment while he was busy prosecuting the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The book also reveals that the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, told President Bush in December 2002 that intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk," but later told associates that he and the C.I.A. should have stated up front in that fall's National Intelligence Estimate and other reports that the evidence was not ironclad, that there was no smoking gun.

(...)

In the wake of Mr. Woodward's best-selling 2002 book"Bush at War" — which presented a laudatory portrait of Mr. Bush as a fearless and determined leader after 9/11 — the president agreed to be interviewed in depth by the author about how and why he decided to go to war against Iraq. Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, says the president also made it clear that he wanted administration members to talk with him, and that he interviewed more than 75 key players. (...)

The resulting volume is his most powerful and persuasive book in years.

In reporting that General Franks said in September 2002 that his people had been"looking for Scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for 10 years and haven't found any yet," Mr. Woodward adds: "It could, and should, have been a warning that if the intelligence was not good enough to make bombing decisions, it probably was not good enough to make the broad assertion, in public or in formal intelligence documents, that there was `no doubt' Saddam had WMD." Vice President Dick Cheney had done exactly that just days before.

Bei Simon & Schuster erschienen. 457 S. Preis am besten über amazon.

Gruß!

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