No Doubts, Then and Now

As President Bush drove the country to what has turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq, did he ever have any doubts about whether it was the right call? Did he ever even consider there might be another way?

The new book by former CIA director George Tenet adds more evidence to the conclusion that once the president's mind was made up, there was no looking back. Inside the White House, the only debate about the war would appear to have been about how to sell it.

The administration's response to this latest charge has been angry -- yet vague. Bush's defenders are still unable to offer up one concrete piece of evidence suggesting that the costs that could (and would) be suffered by American troops and the Iraqi people weighed heavily enough upon the president that he ever seriously questioned his initial decision.

Credibility is Bush's biggest problem these days across the board, whether it's related to his continued assertions about progress in Iraq, his stealthy transformation of the tools of government to partisan purposes, or the trustworthiness of his top aides.

So his certainty about something that went so wrong is not ancient history. It's context.

The Absence of 'Significant Discussion'

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti had the first big headlines from Tenet's book in Friday's New York Times: "'There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,' Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, 'was there ever a significant discussion' about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion."

Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett was immediately out with a response on NBC's Today Show: "This president weighed all the various proposals, weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision," he said. "He understands as a president the most solemn responsibility he has is when he sends people into harm's way that he try everything possible from a diplomatic standpoint, and that's what he did. . . . I've seen meetings, I've listened to the president, both in conversations with other world leaders like Tony Blair as well as internally, where the president did wrestle with those very questions."

But author and editor James Fallows writes that Bartlett is lying: "To be precise about it, no account of the Administration's deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumerable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion? The answer was always, No. The followup challenge to Bartlett should be: show us a memo, show us a policy paper, show us a scheduled meeting, show us notes taken at the time to substantiate the idea that the Administration ever seriously considered what the nation would gain or lose by invading Iraq, and what the alternatives might be. What the Administration actually considered, according to all known evidence, is how it would invade Iraq, and when."

On CNN on Sunday, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser at the time.

"BLITZER: Is he right, the former secretary -- the former CIA director, when he says there was never a serious debate in the Bush administration about the imminence of an Iraqi threat?

"RICE: There was certainly a discussion in the administration with the president, with George, who saw the president, by the way, almost every day in the Oval Office, about what the intelligence was saying about whether the Iraqi threat was getting worse, whether it was you would act earlier or later, given the Iraq threat."

But the New York Times editorial board writes: "Surely no one beyond a handful of the most self-deluded Republicans in Congress was surprised at the disclosure by George Tenet, the former intelligence director, that there was never a serious debate in the Bush administration about whether Iraq actually posed a threat to the United States.