Bush back in the spotlight as memoirs hit the shelves
Decision Points appeared a week after the momentous November 2 US elections saw congressional Republicans make a surprising recovery after falling out of favour with US voters following the eight often tumultuous years of Bush’s administration.
Bush will be as ubiquitous over the next few weeks as he has been scarce since handing over the keys to the White House to Barack Obama in January 2009, with a whirlwind schedule of media appearances to promote his book, which has a print-run of some 1.5 million copies.
In the hefty, 500-page Decision Points, Bush wrote of his errors in the Iraq campaign and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, which international intelligence reports strongly suggested Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had obtained.
“No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons.
“I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do,” Bush wrote.
Asked by NBC if he considered apologising for the mistakes, the former president said he has not.
“Apologising would basically say the decision was a wrong decision,” Bush said at the start of a barrage of interviews that will also see him sit down with talk show supremo Oprah Winfrey.
“I don’t believe it was the wrong decision. I thought the best way to handle this was to find out why. And what went wrong. And to remedy it.”
He insisted, “The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, as are 25 million people who now have a chance to live in freedom in Iraq.”
Decision Points covers 14 separate decisions Bush made while in the White House, offering analysis about how he reached them in an effort to shed further light on his presidency.
The book begins with the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, which drastically reshaped his foreign and military policy, and ends with the economic meltdown during his waning days in the White House.
Scrutiny of the Bush presidency will continue with former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir due in January and Cheney’s a few months later.
Bush confesses he did not respond as effectively as he could have during the Hurricane Katrina crisis, which some critics viewed as the low point of his presidency.
He called his New Orleans flyover a “huge mistake,” and acknowledged he should have stopped in Louisiana to tell local officials and victims of the disaster: “I hear you.”
He said the photographs now seared in public memory showing the president looking out the window of Air Force One on a flight back to Washington made him seem “detached and uncaring”.
“This was a problem of perception, not reality,” Bush said in his book. “My heart broke at the sight of helpless people trapped on their rooftops waiting to be rescued.”
Among the more personal aspects of the book, Bush describes in detail his earlier battles with alcoholism, which he overcame when he was 40 years old.
Bush told NBC in the exclusive broadcast airing late on Monday that one of the worst moments of his presidency occurred when rap superstar Kanye West criticised his administration’s lethargic response to Hurricane Katrina as being driven by racial bias.
“He called me a racist,” the former president said of West’s characteristically bombastic statement at a fundraising concert, just days after Katrina hit the Gulf coast, that Bush “doesn’t care about black people”.
“It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘This man’s a racist.’ I resent it,” said Bush.
“It was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.”
Meanwhile Bush said information obtained from terrorist suspects through “waterboarding” prevented attacks on London, saving British lives.
In his memoirs he said the use of the controversial interrogation technique – which simulates drowning – had helped to break up plots to attack Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf.
The 43rd US president confirmed he authorised the use of waterboarding to extract information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the 9/11 attack, saying: “Damn right!”
Mr Bush said: “Three people were waterboarded and I believe that decision saved lives.”
In the book he writes: “Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States.”
The British government has long rejected the use of waterboarding, which it regards as torture. In a speech last month, the chief of MI6 Sir John Sawers insisted his service had “nothing whatsoever” to do with torture which he described as “illegal and abhorrent”.
In an interview with a British newspaper yesterday, Mr Bush described his close relationship with Tony Blair, but was dismissive of public opinion in Britain about the war in Iraq.
“It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn’t matter any more.
“And frankly, at times, it didn’t matter then,” he said.
Mr Bush recalled how when Mr Blair faced a possible vote of no confidence in Parliament on the eve of war, he offered him the chance to opt out of sending British troops into Iraq.
He said that “rather than lose the government, I would much rather have Tony and his wisdom and his strategic thinking as the prime minister of a strong and important ally”.
However, Mr Blair told him: “I’m in. If it costs the government, fine.”
The former governor of Texas also describes how he was appalled to discover that the intelligence about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction had proved to be wrong.
“The reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false,” he writes.
According to The Guardian, which obtained an advance copy of the book, Mr Bush discloses that he instructed a plan to be drawn up for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
“I directed the Pentagon to study what would be necessary for a strike,” he writes.
“This would be to stop the bomb clock, at least temporarily.”
He says that he also considered mounting an air strike or a covert raid on a secret Syrian nuclear facility, but the Pentagon and the CIA concluded it was “too risky”.
Mr Bush uses his book to describe his battle to give up alcohol, saying it was “one of the toughest decisions I have ever made”.
He adds: “Being the sober guy helped me realise how mindless I must have sounded when I drank.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
