in his ... Despite public denials, Mr McClellan says Mr Bush told him
privately he ...
The Australian:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23774141-2703,00.html
President George Bush used propaganda to invade Iraq: former aide
Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent | May 29, 2008
ONE of George W.Bush's most loyal former aides, Scott McClellan, has launched a blistering attack on the US President, saying his former boss relied on "propaganda" to sell the Iraq war and that the administration has "veered terribly off course".In his new book, Mr McClellan - a former White House press spokesman and aide dating back to Mr Bush's days as Texas governor - said the President was not "open and forthright on Iraq" and had not served the US well as a wartime leader.
"I still like and admire President Bush," Mr McClellan writes in What Happened - Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.
"But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candour and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.
"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided - that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder.
"No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact.
"What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."
Mr Bush was terribly ill-served by his senior advisers, especially those at the top in national security, he says in a swipe at US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a close Bush confidante who served as national security adviser in his first term.
While Mr McClellan describes Mr Bush as "sincere" and "authentic", his attack has stunned Bush administration insiders, and probably the President, who tries to instil intense loyalty in his staff.
This is the most openly critical book of the Bush years from someone who was so close to him in the White House.
At one point, Mr McClellan discusses rumours that Mr Bush used cocaine in his younger days - a charge that dogged him on the presidential campaign trail for the 2000 election.
Despite public denials, Mr McClellan says Mr Bush told him privately he "could not remember" if he used the drug.
"I remember thinking to myself, how can that be?" Mr McClellan writes. "How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine?
"It didn't make a lot of sense."
Mr Bush, he said, "isn't the kind of person to flat-out lie".
"So I think he meant what he said in that conversation about cocaine. It's the first time when I felt I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true," he writes. "His reason for doing so is fairly obvious - political convenience."
This "penchant for self-deception" would have devastating consequences for US foreign policy, he writes, saying Mr Bush was too "stubborn to change and grow" in the White House.
When Mr McClellan finally resigned in April 2006 after three years as press secretary, Mr Bush said: "One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days."
That appears less likely now. His book is in stark contrast to his years as a spokesman, when he was admired by Mr Bush for his willingness to obfuscate from the White House podium, so much so he was dubbed the "Unanswer Man" by The Washington Post.
But at age 40, Mr McClellan is now playing a text-book Washington game. By spilling some beans on the administration as it winds down, he is looking to sell some books while distancing himself from his former employer, whose popularity at home continues to sag. Only about one in five Americans now approve of Mr Bush's performance.
The 341-page book also offers a scathing analysis of the President's response to Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out large parts of New Orleans in August 2005. Mr McClennan says the White House "spent most of the first week in a state of denial".
One of the worst images of the crisis for the President was a photo of Mr Bush surveying New Orleans from the window of Air Force One as he flew over the city.
Mr McClellan puts the blame for that disastrous piece of political imagery squarely at the feet of Karl Rove, the former White House aide to Mr Bush whom the president once dubbed the architect of his political success.
McClellan writes that he and presidential counsellor Dan Bartlett had opposed the idea of the photograph and thought it had been shelved, but "Karl was convinced we needed to do it - and the President agreed".
"One of the worst disasters in our nation's history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush's presidency," he writes. "Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush's second term.
"And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath."
The long-time Bush loyalist says Mr Rove and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, had "at best misled" him about their role in organising the disclosure of the identity of former CIA agent Valerie Plame.
In an infamous briefing on the leaking of Ms Plame's name - which she has alleged was a payback because her husband Joe Wilson, a former diplomat, had been castigating the Bush administration over Iraq - Mr McClellan publicly claimed no one in the White House was involved in leaking her name.
But at Mr Libby's trial for perjury relating to the affair, testimony indicated both Mr Rove and Mr Libby had talked to reporters about Ms Plame. "I allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood," Mr McClellan writes. "It would ultimately prove fatal to my ability to serve the President effectively. I didn't learn that what I'd said was untrue until the media began to figure it out almost two years later."
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