Lightening October Surprise

30 September 2006 |permalink | email article

Bob Woodward’s co-written “All the President’s Men” blew open the Watergate scandal in the Nixon White House, destroying a presidency. His instant new best seller,“State of Denial,” unmasks a dissembling Bush White House and exposes the near religious certitude of this president about the Iraq war.

Beginning with a ‘60 Minutes’ CBS interview Sunday, and lasting all week long on TV shows, Woodward dissects George W. Bush who is at once incurious, in willful denial and incapable of accepting reality. If the media focus remains on Iraq before the mid-term elections, a Republican majority in 2007 becomes more questionable.

The theme differs from “Bush at War,” Woodward’s almost fawning 2002 infatuation with the rush to war and his unprecedented access to the White House principals from the Oval Office down.

The book’s essential story line is that the president misled the American people on Iraq, ignored close advisers who expressed concerns about Donald Rumsfeld and sided, instead, with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, and continues to remain dishonest about the level of violence which intelligence experts say will grow worse in 2007.

What I found especially revealing was Woodward’s reporting on the role of Nixon’s Vietnam-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who “had a powerful, largely invisible influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration,” urging Bush and Cheney to stick it out.

Woodward wrote that Kissinger, who may still incredibly view Vietnam as a victory, gave former Bush speechwriter and adviser Michael Gerson his so-called 1969 salted peanut memo. It warned Nixon that “withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will demanded.” We know where that ended. 

I mean, it’s déjà vu all over again with the Bushies. Just as it is impossible to overemphasize how badly Kissinger’s memo misread the mood of the American people on Vietnam, his peanut analogy doesn’t parse with the pejorative “cut and run” mantra that Bush incessantly repeats despite demands by a majority of Americans for some timetable and an end game in Iraq.

What is there about the word “quagmire” that Vietnam hawk Kissinger and his naïve White House pupils don’t understand?

The book mentions Bush 41. and a prudent worry concerning his son’s obsession for another war. But Bush 43, asked in 2003 about whether he had discussed the fateful decision to invade Iraq with his father, said he had talked to a higher Father. Well then. what did God say? 

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