Posted on 09/29/2006 9:56:53 AM PDT by Howlin
NEW YORK -- Henry Kissinger has been advising President Bush and Vice President Cheney about Iraq, telling them that "victory is the only meaningful exit strategy," author and journalist Bob Woodward said.
The Washington Post editor's third book on the Bush administration, "State of Denial," comes out next week.
In an interview airing Sunday night on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," Woodward said that U.S. troops and their allies are being attacked, on average, every 15 minutes.
"The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon saying, 'Oh, no, things are going to get better.'"
He said Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, has been telling Bush and Cheney that "in Iraq, he declared very simply, 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'"
"This is so fascinating. Kissinger's fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will."
Woodward's 537-page book describes the administration as beset by infighting, according to The New York Times, which obtained an advance copy and reported on its contents Friday.
The 537-page book is based on interviews with administration leaders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. However, sources are not always named, and neither the president nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to interviews, the book says, according to the Times.
Asked about the book, the White House on Thursday night dismissed it, telling The Associated Press it didn't contain anything new. During a briefing Friday at a NATO meeting in Slovenia, Rumsfeld declined comment on the book, saying he hadn't read it.
By William Hamilton Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 29, 2006; 12:24 PM
Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card on two occasions tried and failed to persuade President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, according to a new book by Bob Woodward that depicts senior officials of the Bush administration as unable to face the consequences of their policy in Iraq.
Card made his first attempt after Bush was reelected in November, 2004, arguing that the administration needed a fresh start and recommending that Bush replace Rumsfeld with former secretary of state James A. Baker III. Woodward writes that Bush considered the move, but was persuaded by Vice President Cheney and Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, that it would be seen as an expression of doubt about the course of the war and would expose Bush himself to criticism.
Card tried again around Thanksgiving, 2005, this time with the support of First Lady Laura Bush, who according to Woodward, felt that Rumsfeld's overbearing manner was damaging to her husband. Bush refused for a second time, and Card left the administration last March, convinced that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam and that history would record that no senior administration officials had raised their voices in opposition to the conduct of the war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092900368.html?nav=rss_world/mideast/iraq
Isn't this the same Bob Woodward who claimed to have interviewed ex-CIA Director William J. Casey while he was in a coma?
Fear!
Uncertainty!
Doubt!
Oh my!
One and the same.
He talks about Kissinger being involved like it's a bad thing.
Card's from MA if I remember correctly.
The infantile rantings of Woodward and the rest of the left wing press is not going to matter. They will win neither house of congress.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Woodward was sorched for his last books (favorable to Bush) and is trying to make up for it with this one.
Sounds like a great strategy to me. Why is this moron trying to make it seem as if winning is a bad thing? Oh wait...
"The Washington Post's editor. . . " enough said. About like Howard Dean writing a book saying the same crap. Pelosi. Gore. Clinton.
What true and unmitigated goat dung.
And he is going on 60 Minutes to do a Democrat party commercial and hawk his POS book.
And what utter nonsense. Bush has been saying the exact same thing since he sent the troops in. If anything, Bush has opened the eyes of Kissinger, not the other way around.
"and hawk his POS book"
I think you mean "Dove"
Reminds me of Reagan's comment about the Cold War: "Here's my strategy -- We win. They lose."
Yeah, and like "victory" is a bad thing....sheesh.
We lost in Vietnam, because we lost our will to fight. How else did we lose? Can anyone explain? What part of this truth does Woodward not understand?
Another pathetic, desperate attempt by woodward to show he's still relevant. How many times does he mention Watergate in his interview?
Yep.
Considering our past dependence on Intelligence anything they give should be taken with a grain of salt; second the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will is correct; and finally - Hank is right, he learned from his mistake and does not want it repeated.
Precisely.
You're right on the money. I think Larry King got to him to go down that route.
We'll have to wait and see!
> We lost in Vietnam, because we lost our will to fight. How else did we lose? Can anyone explain? <
I would rather put it this way:
We didn't lose. We walked out.
This and interference in doing what was necessary to win the "conflict." We weren't willing to engage the enemy to extent needed to stop their long term strategy. This was in great part due to communists, traitors and sympathetic "useful idiots" in this country.
If we wish to prevail against islamic jihadists, we must realize that "dialog" is suicide for the west.
Unless I'm mistaken, those are the very same people who are trying to make us lose our will right now.
Rumor has it woodward wants to be hildebeast's Press Secretarty... and I am not kidding!
LLS
Publishing is a business just like any other; should retailers promote Xmas in Feb? should garden care products be rolled out in Nov?
If one is going to write a political book, the best time to promote & sell such a product is before a major election. Check you 401k - you probably own some fraction(s) of media companies. They might be libs, but they're also business people trying to increase shareholder value.
President Bush chose Dr. Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission. The leftists went nuts and he withdrew his name.
This is just shocking (shocking!) "news"!!!!
Kissinger must be breaking some ... law ... or something.
>He talks about Kissinger being involved like it's a bad thing.<
I've NEVER like Henry Kissinger, loyal member of the Council on Foreign Relations that has been running our gubmint since Woodrow Wilson. Yes, it is a very bad thing.
More woodward's death bed confessions?
All the MSM is going to pick up the viet nam analogy in order to betray america the way the Media betrayed america in the 1960s.
And guess which person named in that sentence is no longer among those advising the president?
Woodward thinks this is news? Ha!
If there IS infighting, how surprising might it be, considering how many numbskulls W has to educate to get his policies in place? Leaks here, leaks there, of national security information ... ... Woodward is talking to himself and making a profit on it. blech
One of the things Phyllis Schlafly in her advisory role was how crucial it was for Ronald Reagan to explicitly exclude Henry Kissinger from any policy role with his White House, and she successfully inveighed upon him to keep his promise thereto:
Remembering Reagan -Phyllis Schlafly[ Appointed by President Reagan to serve as a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution ]
Ronald Reagan's three greatest accomplishments were winning the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said), defining conservatism as the belief that big government is the problem not the solution, and convincing all of us that it's morning in America.
Reagan's campaign to win the Cold War began with his battle at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, where he and Senator Jesse Helms waged a Platform battle demanding a "morality in foreign policy" plank that directly attacked the Kissinger-Ford foreign policies. It criticized détente with the Soviet Union, unilateral concessions on nuclear testing, the signing of "secret agreements" to give away the Panama Canal, and Ford's snub of Solzhenitsyn.
The 1976 Platform battle enabled an exciting new grassroots conservative movement to take shape. Reagan bought a half-hour of television time on March 31, 1976, raising what the media labeled "the Kissinger issue." He quoted Henry Kissinger as telling Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, "The day of the United States is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union. My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available." Reagan correctly identified Kissinger's worldview as the policy of surrendering U.S. strategic superiority of the Soviet Union, missile by missile, bomber by bomber, submarine by submarine. Reagan and his followers rejected this as unacceptable.
Reagan narrowly lost the Republican nomination in 1976 to Gerald Ford, who then was defeated by Jimmy Carter. But the pro-American foreign policy which Reagan had articulated survived, and it motivated his followers to build their strength for the 1980 presidential nomination.
Of the many times I met with Ronald Reagan, I count as the most important my visit with him on March 28, 1980, in his Los Angeles office. I directly asked him, "You did promise, didn't you, that you would not reappoint Henry Kissinger or give him any role in making our policy toward the Soviet Union?" Reagan replied, "That's right; I did."
Reagan kept his word to me and to America, both in the backroom negotiations during the 1980 Convention and throughout his two terms in the White House. Reagan reversed the Kissinger policy of accepting second-place to the Soviet Union and adopted the goal of victory over Soviet Communism.
A possible example of his influence would be in the ivory-tower notion that trade with China will democratize it. He was in China recently, meeting a whole host of high-powered, young upwardly mobile Chinese celebrating China's exhuberant economic triumphs...and he point-blank asked them, "well with all these economic successes, now are you ready to begin democratic reform for your people?" And each and everyone of these new "capitalists" was appalled, and said "and risk everything we have accomplished?"
No word if any scales were shaken off the eyes of the founder of Realpolitik. I'm not holding my breath.
If you look at Bob's trendline over the past ten years, he's reached full-blown dementia at this point.
The pols lost. Our military was hamstrung. Viet Nam is our nation's albatross. The history of it will never go away, but we can prove it isn't still our national war (cough) policy if we continue to elect presidents such as Bush. Some day the enemies of America are going to get it. And I include liberals who think like Communists in that list.
How many of those airliners hijacked in the 70's (catch the timeline there -- these followed on with the Viet Nam "war"), and things like the Iranians seizing our embassy in Iran, before 9/11 were directly a result of the lack of our politicians' will to win in Viet Nam, once we committed ourselves.
We ask for more of the above if we elect a liberal president again.
To me, "infighting" just means that Bush is getting a lot of different opinions, and doesn't have a bunch of "yes" men marching in lockstep.
Given how open W is with his staff, "infighting" is a misnomer if Bobby W. is talking about those closest to the president. W welcomes all ideas but holds his own cards, makes his own decisions. He keeps highly intelligent, self-confident, professional people with excellent judgment close to him. These are not the type of people given to turf wars and "infighting." (Earth to Bob Woodward.)
Sometimes I think Woodward is semi-delusional. Making stuff up out of whole cloth and calling it what he wills to sell copy.
I tend to agree. There is a nice summation of some pertinent history...some of it surprisingly recent... that Henry Kissinger likely would like to go down the memory hole of conservatives...as recalled by Phyllis Schalfly:
Kissinger's Exit Leaves Curious Questions UnansweredPhyllis Schlafly,
12/05/2002Henry Kissinger's quick trip across the news headlines as chairman of the new commission to investigate the September 11 attacks was curious. I wish the nosy media, which love to indulge in the sport of "gotcha," would apply their investigative talents to ferreting out the details behind both his appointment and his speedy resignation.
After the Senate Ethics Committee issued its legal opinion that Kissinger must comply with congressional financial disclosure requirements, Kissinger quickly resigned. Apparently he had accepted the appointment believing he could ignore the rules that apply to other government appointees.
Kissinger's plan to reveal his list of clients only to an anonymous third party, chosen by the 9/11 victims and bound to secrecy, was ridiculous. It's not just some closeted individual or even the 9/11 victims who have the right to know his conflicts of interest; it's the American public.
In light of the considerable influence Kissinger has had on U.S. public policy for so many years, where he gets his money should be a matter of public interest. Why aren't investigative reporters searching out his relationships with foreign governments that have a stake in U.S. foreign policies, his loyalties to his clients, and the financial rewards he receives?
Another question for investigative reporters is why the White House was so desperately eager to keep Kissinger as chairman of the 9/11 committee. According to Ethics Committee Chairman Senator Harry Reid, the White House was "calling and berating" the committee staff to pressure them into okaying Kissinger's personal secrecy demands.
It looks as though President Bush selected Kissinger because of his reputation for extraordinary secrecy and his remarkable ability to bamboozle the press by talking out of both sides of his mouth. The appointment couldn't have been because Kissinger supports Bush's ideology and policies, because he doesn't.
In one of the memorable highlights of George W. Bush's presidency, he repudiated the tour de force of Kissinger's career, namely, the infamous Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty signed by Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, as part of the SALT I agreements. On December 13, 2001, President Bush gave formal notice to Russia that the United States was withdrawing from that 30-year-old ABM Treaty.
In the ABM Treaty, President Nixon signed away our right to build an anti-missile defense system because of the theory called Mutual Assured Destruction, popularly known by its acronym MAD. The ABM Treaty should have been immediately judged unconstitutional because it reneged on our government's prime duty: to "provide for the common defense."
Each of the superpowers was supposedly deterred from launching a nuclear attack on the other because of the knowledge that a launch by one side would be followed by massive retaliation that would assure the destruction of both sides. President Reagan exposed the fallacy in that theory when he asked the crucial question on March 23, 1983, "Would it not be better to save lives than to avenge them?"
John Newhouse's 1973 book "Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT" confirmed that every substantive provision of the 1972 U.S.-Soviet agreements was dictated secretly to Kissinger by the Kremlin without the knowledge of our U.S. negotiating team, was accepted by Kissinger, and was then rationalized by Kissinger to the President and Congress. Newhouse's book showed how Kissinger was personally and solely responsible for promising the Soviets that we would not build an anti-missile defense, even though the offensive- weapons provisions of the SALT I agreements guaranteed the Soviet Union superiority in numbers of missiles.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kissinger personally endorsed Newhouse and called his book "outstanding." This made Newhouse's book the authentic historic account of the Moscow agreements.
Kissinger successfully obfuscated the tremendous danger to America in the 1972 agreements, and he made the media his ally in the coverup. It was not until President Reagan (who excluded Kissinger from foreign policy influence) spoke out against the ABM Treaty that Republicans began demanding that we withdraw from it.
We thank George W. Bush for doing exactly that, and it should be a national priority to build an anti-missile defense system now.
Even though we no longer worry about Russia using its still-existing 6,000 nuclear warheads against us, the danger of attack or blackmail from other nuclear arsenals is real. China has 300 nuclear warheads deployed on ballistic missiles and 13 ICBMs targeting U.S. cities.
The list of Third World countries developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, plus ballistic missile delivery systems, includes North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The risk comes not only from intentional use but from accidental or unauthorized launches.
While our curiosity has not been satisfied about the details surrounding Kissinger's latest foray onto the national scene, we know enough about Kissinger's ABM Treaty to know that he shouldn't be in any position to influence U.S. policies.
Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum
"before 9/11 were directly a result of the lack of our politicians' will to win in Viet Nam, once we committed ourselves."
Actually, it was not so much our unwillingness to win, but we have to face the fact that the 60's ushered in the first "political correctness," in US war history, which was promoted by communist sympathizers in our own country. As an example, Mai Lai was no small matter and still resonates today.
Never did like Henry Kissinger. Maybe it was his accent. ~snicker~ Didn't care for Gerald Ford either. If Kissinger is telling Bush and Cheney, that "victory is the only meaningful exit strategy", maybe Henry has finally seen the light.
I'm glad Reagan kept his word and didn't appoint Kissinger to any official post in a Reagan admin. Never heard of any unofficial Kissinger visits to the WH while Reagan was Prez. However, Reagan called on Nixon many times for his advice when it came to matters involving foreign affairs.
I especially like this part:
Ronald Reagan's three greatest accomplishments were winning the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said), defining conservatism as the belief that big government is the problem not the solution, and convincing all of us that it's morning in America.
And the Dems appear to be advising Hugo Chavez...
Hugo, Osama , and Saddam
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