Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell are so upset with one another over the Iraq war that they are barely on speaking terms, according to excerpts from a new book published in the Washington Post on Saturday.
The book, entitled "Plan of Attack," is not due to be released until next week but the Post's assistant managing editor, Robert Woodward, wrote it and the newspaper is reporting from it.
Woodward, perhaps best known for his role in the Watergate scandal that forced the resignation of president Richard Nixon in 1974, interviewed administration officials for the book, including Bush.
He writes that the relationship between Cheney and Powell became so strained over the plans to invade Iraq that Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms.
Powell, Woodward said, opposed the war and believed Cheney was obsessively trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network. He said Powell believed Cheney took ambiguous intelligence and treated it as fact.
"Powell felt Cheney and his allies - his chief aide, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas J. Feith and what Powell called Feith's 'Gestapo' office - had established what amounted to a separate government," the Post writes.
"The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a dinner he hosted a year ago celebrating the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and 'always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.'"
But Powell agreed to publicly support the war after Bush personally asked him to, according to Woodward's book.
Bush also said he prayed for divine guidance in launching the war.
"I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right," the Post quotes Bush as saying.
Bush told Woodward he was co-operating on the book because he wanted the story of how the United States had gone to war in Iraq to be told.
Bush hoped to leave a record that "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives".
"But the news of this, in my judgement, the big news out of this isn't how George W. makes decisions," Bush is quoted as saying.
"To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book, as far as I'm concerned".
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