Bush: 'That's How I Work'

"According to the book, Britain's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, was horrified: ''Why in God's name has he said that again?' he asked [a colleague]. . . .

"Mr Blair's private doubts about Mr Bush dated back to the attacks on the World Trade Center when the President took to the skies in Air Force One, the book says.

"'Blair was troubled that Bush's priority appeared to be keeping out of danger.'"

Here are parts one and two of the excerpts from Seldon's book.

Another Powell quote about his chats with his British counterpart: "We were worried that our two leaders might not have a strong enough sense of the consequences of removing Saddam militarily.

"One of us made a quip about regime change - that it might not be regime change in Baghdad that we should be worrying about."

Iran Watch

Brian Knowlton writes in the New York Times: "Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, urged the Bush administration on Sunday to soften its statements about Iran while maintaining diplomatic pressure to halt the nuclear enrichment that could lead to the production of a nuclear weapon. . . .

"'We cannot add fuel to the fire,' Dr. ElBaradei said on ' Late Edition' on CNN. 'I would hope we would stop spinning and hyping the Iranian issue.'"

Michael Hirsh writes in Newsweek that after "weeks of hawkish anti-Iran rhetoric from Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials, some U.S. allies worry that, as [one] European diplomat said, 'the U.S. administration is going ahead on its own.' What had begun as a multilateral effort to stop Tehran from getting nuclear-bomb know-how has turned into a broadside out of Washington, said the diplomat, whose position also required him to speak anonymously. As justification, the administration blames Tehran for nearly every ill wind in the Mideast, criticizing not just the nuclear program but Iranian interference in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories."

For background, see Friday's column: Going It Alone on Iran.

The New York Times editorial board writes: "America's allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month he raised the threat of 'World War III' if Iran even figures out how to make a nuclear weapon.

"With a different White House, we might dismiss this as posturing -- or bank on sanity to carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd."