From Former Insider, Questions About White House Candor

By Scott McCleLLan; President Bush

A book by a former White House press secretary accuses President Bush of failing to be honest with the American public about the war in Iraq.

Speaking at the Air Force Academy commencement ceremony yesterday, President Bush said the United States is engaged in a battle of wills against “evil men” and compared the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the campaigns against Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II.

In his new book describing his time spent working within the Bush administration, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan calls the war in Iraq “unnecessary” and a “strategic blunder,” claiming that senior administration officials manipulated public opinion through a “political propaganda campaign” beginning in 2002 to “aggressively sell the war,” even as he and other officials insisted to the public that all options were on the table.

Others, including former national security advisor Richard Clarke, have written books challenging the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

But none have been as close to the center of power as McClellan, which also explains the shocked response from his former colleagues still within the administration.

McClellan’s service with the president dates to Mr. Bush’s second gubernatorial term in Texas. His book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, is due to be released Monday but actually went on sale yesterday.

In it, he levels a host of charges against his former boss, faulting the president in particular for a lack of personal candor and an unwillingness to admit mistakes.

McClellan, 40, who served as Mr. Bush’s press secretary from May 2003 to April 2006, reveals that he was pushed to leave earlier than he had planned, and he displays some bitterness about that as well as about being sometimes kept out of the loop on key decision- making sessions.

He excludes himself from major involvement in some of what he calls the administration’s biggest blunders, for instance the decision to go to war and the initial campaign to sell that decision to the American people. But he doesn’t spare himself entirely, saying, “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.”

He also includes criticism for the reporters whose questions he fielded. The news media, he says, were “complicit enablers” for focusing more on “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.”

McClellan does issue a disclaimer regarding Mr. Bush himself: “I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.”

But most everything else he writes comes awfully close to making just this assertion.

The heart of the book concerns Mr. Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq, a determination McClellan says the president had made by early 2002 — at least a full year before the invasion — if not even earlier.

“He signed off on a strategy for selling the war that was less than candid and honest,” McClellan writes

McClellan says Mr. Bush’s main reason for war always was “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom.” But Mr. Bush and his advisers made “a marketing choice” to downplay this rationale in favor of one focused on increasingly trumped-up portrayals of the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction.

During the “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” Mr. Bush and his team tried to make the “WMD threat and the Iraqi connection to terrorism appear just a little more certain, a little less questionable than they were.” Something else was downplayed as well, McClellan says: any discussion of “the possible unpleasant consequences of war — casualties, economic effects, geopolitical risks, diplomatic repercussions.”

In Mr. Bush’s second term, as news from Iraq grew worse, McClellan says the president was “insulated from the reality of events on the ground and consequently began falling into the trap of believing his own spin.”

All of this was a “serious strategic blunder” that sent Mr. Bush’s presidency “terribly off course.”

“The Iraq war was not necessary,” McClellan concludes.

McClellan draws a portrait of Mr. Bush as possessing “personal charm, wit and enormous political skill.” He says Mr. Bush’s administration early on possessed “seeds of greatness.”

But McClellan ticks off a long list of the president’s weaknesses: someone with a penchant for self-deception if it “suits his needs at the moment,”"an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader” who has a lack of interest in delving deeply into policy options, a man with a lack of self-confidence that makes him unable to acknowledge when he’s been wrong.

McClellan is most scathing on the topic of the administration’s embrace of secrecy.

“The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine,” he writes.

Three top Bush advisers come in for particularly harsh criticism.

McClellan calls Vice President Dick Cheney “the magic man” who “always seemed to get his way” and sometimes “simply could not contain his deep-seated certitude, even arrogance, to the detriment of the president.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser earlier in Mr. Bush’s presidency, “was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort on helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences” of war. Rice “was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview,” McClellan says, but he predicts that “history will likely judge her harshly.”

And former Bush political guru Karl Rove “always struck me as the kind of person who would be willing, in the heat of battle, to push the envelope to the limit of what is permissible ethically or legally.”

McClellan’s former colleagues in the White House appeared stunned by the book’s content.

Dana Perino, the current White House press secretary, said the president was “surprised” by McClellan’s assertions.

“He is puzzled, and he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years,” Perino said, adding that Mr. Bush was “disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff.”

Rove compared McClellan to a “left-wing blogger,” and former White House counselor Dan Bartlett told CNN it was “misguided for him to make these kind of broad accusations and draw these big conclusions about the president.”

Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary before McClellan took over in 2003, said he first met McClellan in Austin in 1999 when the two worked on the Bush presidential campaign.

“That’s one of the reasons this book comes as such a shock,” Fleischer said. “It comes from the last person that anyone would have thought would have said these things or written these things. … All you can do is scratch your head when you see how far he’s turned.”

Material from the Associated Press, The Denver Post and The Washington Post was used to compile this report.

The Bush administration conducted a “political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people.”

Originally published by Journal wire reports.

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