The Bush administration will brace itself on Monday morning for a fresh round of adverse publicity with the appearance of the latest exposé from the investigative reporter Bob Woodward that portrays the US government as being riddled with dissension over the Iraq war.
Woodward’s book, which goes on sale on Monday, has already caused international ructions with its claims that the Bush administration had for years been spying on its Iraqi allies — the government of the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his staff. The spying is alleged to have been much more than routine, including access to Iraqi government plans, manoeuvres and the secret actions of the prime minister. In the book, Woodward quotes one unnamed official who says: ”We know everything [Maliki] says.”
Such serious claims from one of America’s best known and most respected journalists cannot easily be brushed aside, and have prompted outrage in Baghdad. On Sunday the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, responded indirectly to the allegations, telling reporters during a tour of North Africa: ”I can say that we have an open and political diplomatic relationship with the Iraqis that is cooperative.”
The War Within: a Secret White House History, 2006-2008, is the fourth volume in Woodward’s detailed account of the Bush administration at war. In early volumes the author, who leaped to worldwide fame as one of the two reporters credited with breaking the 1970s Watergate scandal, was criticised for being soft on the president, but his stance has toughened with each new volume.
Also likely to cause the administration considerable discomfort are passages in the book, printed in the Washington Post on Monday, that suggest the government’s strategy on the Iraq war at the height of the Sunni insurgency in 2006 was ”crippled by dissension among the president’s advisers, delayed by political calculations and undermined by a widening and bitter rift in civilian-military relations”.
With suicide bombings running at record levels, Woodward claims that Bush held the then commander of US forces in Iraq, George Casey, in such distrust that he circumvented the established chain of command and went behind his back to his eventual replacement, General David Petraeus. The suspicions were mutual, Woodward says. Casey regarded the president as one of the biggest problems in the conduct of the war. Casey confided to a colleague that he saw Bush as being from the ”radical wing of the Republican party that kept saying, ‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed”’.
The Woodward book comes as the latest in a long line of exposés that have consistently caught the administration off balance. Earlier this year the former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, published What Happened, in which he accused the president of self-deception.
The criticisms of Bush present the president with a problem. On the one hand, he will want to secure his legacy as he leaves the White House. On the other hand, any comment made from the administration is certain to be injected into the intensifying presidential campaign, in which the Democrats are portraying the Republican candidate, John McCain, as another Bush. – guardian.co.uk