The Covered-Up Meeting

The Rest of the Book

For an overview of Woodward's book, see my Friday column: Is Woodward Calling Bush a Liar?

In Sunday's excerpt in The Washington Post, Woodward writes: "There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly."

He writes about the administration's apparent lack of a military strategy in post-invasion Iraq. He quotes national security adviser Stephen Hadley saying in early 2004: "If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it. I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."

He writes about Andrew H. Card Jr.'s concerns as he was stepping down from his post as chief of staff this spring.

"One of Card's great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. . . .

"As best as Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of 'What could we do differently?' But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying, 'Let's examine alternatives,' as had surfaced after the Vietnam era. . . .

"Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush's public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

"But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was."

In Monday's excerpt in The Washington Post, Woodward describes Card encouraging Bush to consider a new secretary of defense after the 2004 election. Senior adviser Karl Rove was present for the conversation.

"[C]learly, the conduct of the war in Iraq would be the subject of confirmation hearings for anyone Bush nominated to be the new secretary of defense.

"Rove agreed they did not want to do anything that would prompt hearings on the war.

"'If we need to do it, we need to do it. But if we don't need to do it, you know,' Bush said, deciding nothing but sounding reluctant to make a change. . . .