That ends on quite the quote. PETER BAKER, chief White House correspondent for the N.Y. Times, is out Tuesday with his tour de force, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House” (Doubleday; 816 pages – 650 pages of text, plus footnotes, etc.). Here are a few notes from early readers: By the time they left office, Bush and Cheney were on opposite sides of almost every major issue, including North Korea, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, Middle East peace talks, gun rights, gay rights, climate change, surveillance, detention and the auto bailout. And that was all before the Scooter Libby pardon. … There were more doubts about invading Iraq inside the Bush team than were publicly known at the time. Karen Hughes, one of the presidents closest confidantes, worried that it would be a mistake to go to war and brought up her concerns with Bush. The president sent her to Condoleezza Rice for reassurance, but she was never fully convinced and at several points tried to keep Bush from feeling trapped into going to war. As one senior official who came to rue his involvement in Iraq put it, “The only reason we went into Iraq, I tell people now, is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick. Afghanistan was too easy.”
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 17:02:26 +0000
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