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Hear no evil, read no evil, speak drivel

Bush's press conference shows just how ill-informed he is about Iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1192158,00.html

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday April 15, 2004
The Guardian

On April 21 1961, President Kennedy held a press conference to answer
questions on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles that he
had approved. "There's an old saying," he said, "that victory has a
hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... I am the responsible officer
of the government and that is quite obvious."
On Wednesday, President Bush held only his third press conference and was
asked three times whether he accepted responsibility for failing to act on
warning before September 11. "I'm sure something will pop into my head
here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying
to come up with an answer, but it hadn't [sic] yet," he said. "I just
haven't - you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not quick - as
quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

Bush's press conference was the culmination of his recent efforts to
staunch the political wounds of his bleeding polls since the 9/11
commission began public hearings and violence spiralled in Iraq. Bush had
tried to divert blame by declaring that the August 6 memo he was forced to
declassify at the commission's insistence contained no "actionable
intelligence", even though it specifically mentioned the World Trade
Centre and Washington as targets.

Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them
orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet.
President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing
any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He
extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is
almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his
memoranda from the 9/11 commission.

"I know he doesn't read," one former Bush national security council
staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It
seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on
WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that
undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence
that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq,
warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the
neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office.

Nor was Bush aware of similar warnings urgently being sounded by the
military's top strategic analysts. One monograph, Reconstructing Iraq, by
the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, predicted in
detail "possible severe security difficulties" and conflicts among Iraqis
that US forces "can barely comprehend". I have learned that it was
suppressed by the Pentagon neocons, and only released to US central
command after Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the foreign
relations committee, directly intervened. A revolt within the military
against Bush is brewing. Many in the military's strategic echelon share
the same feelings of being ignored and ill-treated by the administration
that senior intelligence officers voice in private. "The Pentagon began
with fantasy assumptions on Iraq and worked back," one of them remarked to
me.


As the iconic image of the "war president" has tattered, another picture
has emerged. Bush appears as a passive manager who enjoys sitting atop a
hierarchical structure, unwilling and unable to do the hard work a real
manager has to do to run the largest enterprise in the world. He does not
seem to absorb data unless it is presented to him in simple, clear fashion
by people whose judgment he trusts. He is receptive to information that
agrees with his point of view rather than information that challenges it.
This leads to enormous power on the part of the trusted interlocutors, who
know and bolster his predilections.

At his press conference, Bush was a confusion of absolute confidence and
panic. He jumbled facts and conflated threats, redoubling the vehemence of
his incoherence at every mildly sceptical question. He attempted to create
a false political dichotomy between "retreat" and his own vague and
evolving position on Iraq, which now appears to follow senator John
Kerry's, of granting more authority to the UN and bringing in Nato.

The ultimate revelation was Bush's vision of a divinely inspired
apocalyptic struggle in which he is the leader of a crusade bringing the
Lord's "gift." "I also have this belief, strong belief that freedom is not
this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every
man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the
earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." But religious
war is not part of official US military doctrine.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and
Washington bureau chief of Salon.com

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