Heritage

‘Bush At War’ paints former President as keen strategist

Bush

Every generation has a war. In the 70s it was the Vietnam War, in the 80s, Lebanon and Iran hostage crises, while in 90s we had the Gulf and Bosnian wars. Every war needs a strategy. Every war needs diplomacy. Every war needs a general.

This is the position the United States found itself in following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks by Al-Qaeda fronted by Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden on their soil.

Then US President George W. Bush, past the shock and anger, had decided to go after the aggressors on their turf, their financiers and government backers. It is against this backdrop that Bob Woodward, a veteran journalist of The Washington Post, took his nose for news, in search of a few new morsels in the book, Bush At War.

On the other side of the Atlantic, one of the coalition force members, Britain seeks, in a few weeks, to engage former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on claims that he took his nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses.

Woodward explores through secret memos, accounts of those present, and the internal temperature Mr Bush in the days after the terror attacks and decision to go to “war against terror” leading to his now infamous line “you are either with us or against us”.

Bush At War paints the former US president as a sensitive strategist keen on tact as well as maximising brute force. A man led by “gutt” whose ear was had by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and supported emotionally by his wife, Laura.

Eighteen days after the attacks, the war council had a general feel of what they wanted. The military held out on the air strikes in Afghanistan, because they did not have a Combat Search and Rescue team “in the general vicinity of the air strikes” even though small tact teams were ready for deployment.

Laws were amended to give the CIA power to execute their mandate broadly. The establishment went after financiers of terror, including closure of money transfer organisations such as Dahabshiil. Renditions of terrorists, putting their organisation’s on ice indefinitely became common place.

African governments with dubious human rights records offered to help. Western nations keen to avoid attacks on their own soil came on board. Plans for humanitarian assistance were set. The US had the support they needed.

White paper, the text to go with the war and proper intelligence was all that seemed missing.

Woodward used both his sources and passion to tell fact from fiction, to write this acclaimed book in the year after America was hit on home soil.

Perhaps both as an observer of history, as well as an unearther of truth of the state of America and the men leading it through the fog of the worst period in recent history altering the geopolitics and state of our world as we know it.

Grab a copy and see the biggest story of the decade in hindsight.

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