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• Tuesday, May 15, 2007 03:00 PM

  A Mega-Pattern

  One thing that leaps out to me here--not that it's new information--is the lengths that Bush went to (virtually unchallenged and unreported, natch) in order to prevent scrutiny of a decision-making process that didn't exist. (After all, who needs a decisionmaking process when you've got the decider in the house? Processes are for girly men.)

  What else can one draw from this sort of statement?

  "Clearly, there are privilege issues that have to be considered," Gonzales said. "As a general matter, we would not be disclosing internal deliberations, internal recommendations. That's not something we'd do as a general matter, whether or not you're a current member of the administration or a former member of the administration."

  "You have to wonder what could Messrs. Comey and Ashcroft add to the discussion," Gonzales added.

  What they could add, of course, is a description of the utter farce of a "decisionmaking process," which of course brings two things immediately to mind. One is the well-known Suskind/DiIullio interview in which DiIullio spilled the beans on the complete lack of a substantive policy process.

  The other--unfortunately much less well-known--is USA Today's 9/11 First Anniversary story reporting on the total lack of a formal decision-making process in deciding to go to war with Iraq, within weeks of 9/11:

  http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-war_x.htm

  Iraq course set from tight White House circle

  By John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

  WASHINGTON — President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.

  Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end.

  How did Bush make the decision, perhaps the most consequential of his presidency?

  USA TODAY interviewed officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard. The process underscores Bush's confidence in his own judgment and his hard-line policy instincts. It shows his reliance on a tight circle of aides, his penchant for secrecy and his preference for unilateral action. And it illustrates how his approach has complicated his efforts now to win support from allies and members of Congress who felt they weren't adequately consulted before.

  Among the key findings:

  The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

  "There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

  Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.

  This is how they do everything. It's not groupthink. It's much, much worse than groupthink. They don't even form an organized group. And they definitely don't think. So, of course, they don't want anyone talking about it.

  But this is how we went to war. And there was nothing secret about it, really. This was a story in USA Today, which ran the month before Congress voted for the AUMF. But it was, characteristically, a one-off story (not even a one-day story) that no one else picked up on. It was there in plain sight, but it was ignored.

  Naturally, this is also how they "prepared" for Katrina. It's how they do everything. And no one has a right to examine it. It's not something they normally do. It would be partisan, when we need to be bipartisan. It would be "going backward," when what we need is a "new way forward."

  Don't you just wish you'd thought of this sort of language when you were a teenager???

  —Paul Rosenberg Read Paul Rosenberg's other letters
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