President Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points, hits stores today. In a series of promotional interviews with mainstream and conservative news outlets, Bush opens up about his personal fight with alcoholism, his mother’s traumatic miscarriage, and some of the most defining moments of his presidency. Judging from press accounts, the memoir offers few substantive revelations. It is, as the Washington Post‘s book critic Jonathan Yardley describes it, “not a memoir as the term is commonly understood — an attempt to examine and interpret the writer’s life — but an attempt to write history before the historians get their hands on it.” Indeed, Bush’s memoir is full of the kind of half truths, stubborn rationalizations, and outright misrepresentations that dominated his eight-year presidency. Throughout the book, Bush admits only to the most cursory of mistakes and communications failures, while defending his most unpopular decisions.
IRAQ — ‘I WAS A DISSENTING VOICE’: Bush doubles down on the disastrous war in Iraq, writing, “Saddam Hussein didn’t just pursue weapons of mass destruction. He had used them.” “He deployed mustard gas and nerve agents against the Iranians and massacred more than five thousand innocent civilians,” Bush said, adding that he believed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was stunned to find out that he didn’t. It was “unbelievably frustrating,” Bush told Fox News‘ Sean Hannity. “Of course, it was frustrating. It — everybody thought he had WMD. Everybody being every intelligence service, everybody in the administration .” “No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do,” Bush writes in his book. When asked by NBC’s Matt Lauer if he filtered out dissenting voices against the war, Bush retorted, “I was a dissenting voice. I didn’t want to use force. I mean force is the last option for a president. And I think it’s clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world’s better off without Saddam in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis.” Recently declassified documents and press accounts, however, contradict Bush’s version of events and reveal that his administration was looking for a way to “decapitate” the Iraqi government since 2001. As Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill — who Bush fired for “disagreeing too many times” with him — puts it, Bush was “all about finding a way to [go to war]. That was the tone of it. The President saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.'” In 2002, Bush also reportedly told then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, while she was in a meeting with three U.S. Senators on how to approach Iraq diplomatically, “F— Saddam. We’re taking him out.” In “talking about why we needed this war,” Bush also later referenced an alleged Iraqi assassination plot against Bush’s father: “We need to get Saddam Hussein…that Mother F—– tried to take out my Dad.” Asked by Lauer if he ever considered apologizing to the American people over the war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, Bush replied, “I mean, apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision,” Bush replied. “And I don’t believe it was the wrong decision.”
TORTURE — ‘DAMN RIGHT’: Bush writes that he also has no regrets about authorizing the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques on captured prisoners and admits personally authorizing the illegal torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. When asked whether the partial drowning technique could be used, Bush’s answer was emphatic: “Damn right.” In his interview with Lauer, Bush said his lawyers told him waterboarding was legal. “Because the lawyer said it was legal,” Bush rationalized. “He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. But you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do,” Bush said. He also dismissed critics like former New Jersey Governor and co-head of the 9/11 Commission Thomas Kean, who has said that the administration simply shaped the legal opinions around their intended policy. [Kean] “obviously doesn’t know,” Bush replied. “I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That’s why I’ve written the book. He can, they can draw whatever conclusion they want. But I will tell you this. Using those techniques saved lives. My job is to protect America and I did.” It’s not clear that torture did, however. For instance, Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture, and as a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq argues, waterboarding has actually cost American lives: “The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001,” he says. In his memoir, Bush also contends that he was “blindsided” by the photos of abused prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and twice considered accepting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation over the incident. Bush wrote, “I knew it would send a powerful signal. I seriously considered accepting his advice. I knew it would send a powerful signal to replace the leader of the Pentagon after such a grave mistake. But a big factor held me back. There was no obvious replacement for Don.”
KATRINA — KANYE’S COMMENTS WERE ‘THE WORST’: Bush did accept some responsibility for the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, telling Lauer, “Yes. The lack of crisp response was a failure at all levels of government.” But he seemed most disappointed about the unfortunate picture taken of him in Air Force One, flying over New Orleans, and the criticism he received over the incident. Bush said he looked “detached and uncaring” in the photo, admitting, “It’s always my fault. I should have touched down in Baton Rouge, met with the governor, and, you know, walked out and said, ‘I hear you.’ I mean, ‘We know. We understand. And we’re gonna, you know, help the state and help the locals, governments with as much resources as needed.’ And — and then got back on a flight up to Washington. I did not do that and paid a price for it.” Bush also explained his now infamous “heck of a job” comments to FEMA director Mike Brown. “My intention was simply to say to somebody who’s workin’ hard, ‘Keep workin’ hard,'” Bush rationalized. “And it turns out that– those words became a club for people to say, ‘Wait, this guy’s out of touch .'” Unfortunately for Bush, the criticism is far harsher than that. A 2006 report compiled by House Republicans slammed what it called “a failure of leadership,” saying that the federal government’s “blinding lack of situational awareness and disjointed decision making needlessly compounded and prolonged Katrina’s horror.” The report specifically blamed Bush, noting that “earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response” because the president alone could have cut through bureaucratic resistance. Still, for Bush, the worst moment of the disaster — and possibly his entire presidency — came when rapper Kanye West said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during an NBC telethon. “I faced a lot of criticism as President,” Bush writes in his book. “I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low.” When pressed by Lauer on why “the worst moment in your Presidency was [not] watching the misery in Louisiana, but rather when someone insulted you because of that,” Bush replied, “No, I — that — and I also make it clear that the misery in Louisiana affected me deeply as well. There’s a lot of tough moments in the book. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple.”
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