POLITICS
What makes George run?In election-year books, Bush emerges as focused, firm, and uninterested in debateIn the torrent of new insider books about his presidency, George W. Bush emerges as an admirable figure in nearly every way. Choosing a policy course, he is crisp, focused, and decisive. Within the White House, he has assembled a team that is unusually collegial, works hard, and performs. In his personal life, he is solidly anchored in faith, family, and friends. All these are traits to be welcomed, especially in comparison with some of his recent predecessors.
Yet these portraits of Bush also suggest there is one element that is missing -- and upon that could hinge the fate of his presidency. Historians searching through recent books about him will surely ponder two moments they describe. The first was the day before Thanksgiving in 2001 -- just 72 days after the nation was attacked by al Qaeda terrorists -- when Bush pulled aside his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, for a private talk. ''I want you . . .," he began, then restarted, ''What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq? How do you feel about the war plan for Iraq?" That conversation, as recalled by Bob Woodward in ''Plan of Attack" (Simon & Schuster, $28), created a momentum for war that became unstoppable. Over the next 16 months, Rumsfeld, along with General Tommy Franks and others, undertook meticulous planning to ensure that a US-led attack on Iraq would end quickly and victoriously. We knew, then, exactly how to invade. But Woodward can find no meeting when the president asked his team whether to invade. Bush was much more interested in how than why -- logistics over substance. He apparently never called in members of Congress and he never asked his national security team to debate the war in front of him. Nor did he ask Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Colin Powell or the head of the Joint Chiefs for their candid opinions. To be fair, the president and his team did hold meetings on a related topic that has since become a subject of hot debate -- how to introduce security and democracy in Iraq after the fighting stopped. But those conversations were nowhere near as probing as those on the logistics of winning. Nor did the president push hard to determine whether the intelligence reports he was receiving were accurate. America thus entered its toughest war since Vietnam without full and serious deliberation at the top. Now let's flash forward to another moment: just after Thanksgiving in 2002. A second major tax package is under consideration at the White House. This time, the president does call in his key advisers -- a promising start for Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, as related to Ron Suskind for his book, ''The Price of Loyalty" (Simon & Schuster, $26). But the conversation soon lurches from one topic to the next; O'Neill reports there is no structured debate, mostly because the players at the table aren't working from a well-prepared, well-staffed briefing paper read in advance. Soon, the focus shifts from whether to go forward with a $600 billion package to how -- from substance to logistics yet again. ''That's what you get without Brandeis briefs, without the hard factual analysis that allows you to make informed judgments about the worth of various proposals, about what you can reasonably expect, about what is known," O'Neill said later. ''I think of a meeting like that, with so much at stake. . . . It's like June bugs hopping around on a lake." Within a month, O'Neill was gone -- fired without warning. Continued... |
