Conor O'Clery's round-up of news from the United States.
'I'm the toxic Texan, right?" This is how George Bush saw himself in the world's eyes as he started out on his presidency. It is one of the insights in Bob Woodward's new book Bush at War, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of how America went to war after September 11th.
The President emerges as a decisive, action-driven guy. Laura Bush was not happy however with her husband's public vow to get Osama bin Laden "dead or alive".
"Tone it down, darling," she told him, but he wouldn't. Bush was all for going it alone in the war on terrorism if necessary. "At some point we may be the only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America," he told his national security advisers.
The hero of the book is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who won the battle for diplomacy over unilateralism. The villain is Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an "egomaniac cleverly disguised", in words attributed to a military officer.
Woodward, who was given extraordinary access to top people and classified memos, depicts Rumsfeld as a hawk who first raised the prospect of attacking Iraq on the day after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Powell "rolled his eyes" at Gen Hugh Shelton, who said there was no link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Bush was reassured by Cofer Black, chief of counter-terrorist operations, that they would get those responsible.
"When we are through with them we will have flies walking across their eyeballs," said Black, who was afterwards known in Bush's inner circle as the "flies-on-the-eyeballs guy". We learn that acronyms are popular in the Bush White House. Osama Bin laden is OBL. When the President was told something was FUBAR he knew it meant Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
The war in Afghanistan was launched on the principle that Afghans could not be bought but could be rented. It began with a CIA man called Gary flying in with a metal suitcase containing $3 million in $100 bills which he doled out to warlords. In one case $50,000 was offered to a commander to defect; when he demurred US Special Forces directed a J-DAM precision bomb outside his HQ, and next day he settled for $40,000.
There are intimate glimpses of Bush aides singing "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" at Camp David as the President works on a jig-saw. Powell wasn't in that close circle. In the early days he was often "put in the icebox", i.e., kept off television by Bush adviser Karl Rove. During a futile trip to the Middle East, Powell was told by his deputy, Richard Armitage, "they're eating cheese on you" at home, meaning his rivals were enjoying his discomfiture.
Powell began to get private meetings with the boss, however, and on August 5th had a two-hour dinner with Bush that may have changed history. The Secretary of State forcefully put the case to the President for going through the United Nations on Iraq. He didn't argue against war, but about the best way to go about it, with the prospect that the threat of war might do the trick.
"It's nice to say we can do it unilaterally," Powell told Bush, "except you can't." Vice-President Dick Cheney later made a hard-line speech rejecting renewed weapons inspections as futile, but Powell won the day. Woodward also revealed something of Bush's attitude towards the pesky media. When visiting Pakistani President Musharraf brought up a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh alleging that the Pentagon had contingency plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons if the country became unstable, Bush simply replied: "Seymour Hersh is a liar."
* * ** * *
Woodward's role has changed since he was a gumshow reporter on the Watergate story. He is now Washington's consumate media insider, giving star treatment in his books to those who grant him most access, as Colin Powell obviously did. Access to the President is power, and other media figures crave it. Woodward disclosed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News, the conservative cable news network, sent a confidential message to Bush urging him to respond to al-Qaeda "using the harshest measures possible". This was picked up gleefully by rival channel CNN as contradicting the claim of Fox News (motto:"We report, you decide") to be scrupulously non-partisan. Ailes told the Washington Post, "Woodward got it all screwed up, as usual."
**********
Donald Rumsfeld may not be able to control who talks to Woodward but the Defence Secretary can keep things tight on the battlefield. As the US war in Afghanistan got under way, many US reporters were quarantined in media tents. About 100 journalists gathered last week in Washington for a conference sponsored by a new organisation, Military Editors & Reporters, at which Woodward (who else?) was the keynote speaker.
The consensus was that under Rumsfeld the Pentagon has taken information control to new extremes. Stories were told of reporters travelling with the US military who had to rely on transcripts of Pentagon briefing's back home to know what was going on. The New York Time's Mark Thompson accused Rumsfeld of "lack-of-information warfare" against the press, and Arthur Kent of the History channel warned that in the event of war in Iraq, attempts to muzzle reporters would be "unprecedented".
* * *
Another case of media control was disclosed in the Atlantic Monthly this week. Historian Robert Dallek got access to President John F. Kennedy's medical files. He found that Kennedy suffered stomach, colon and prostate problems, high fevers, occasional dehydration, abscesses, sleeplessness, and high cholesterol, in addition to back ailments and Addison's disease. His range of motion was severely restricted, and the pain was extreme, despite heavy and constant medication. Kennedy hid his sickliness well. In 1960 when it was reported, correctly, that he had Addison's disease, Kennedy had his doctors deny the illness and proclaim him to be in "excellent" health. If all this was known, the journal said, Kennedy would probably never have got elected.