Powell Warned Bush on Iraq, "you break it, you own it."

Powell Warned Bush on Iraq, "you break it, you own it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/international/middleeast/17BOOK.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

Two months before the invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warned President Bush about the potential negative consequences of a war, citing what Mr. Powell privately called the "you break it, you own it" rule of military action, according to a new book.

"You're sure?" Mr. Powell is quoted as asking Mr. Bush in the Oval Office on Jan. 13, 2003, as the president told him he had made the decision to go forward. "You understand the consequences," he is said to have stated in a half-question. "You know you're going to be owning this place?"

The book, "Plan of Attack," by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, reconstructs that and other private conversations between senior Bush administration officials during the 16-month period of planning and preparation that ended with the attack on Iraq last March.

It has been well known that Mr. Powell was the most skeptical among Mr. Bush's senior advisers about the wisdom of invading Iraq. But the new details described in the book, at a time when the American occupation has met with new perils, add considerably to a portrait of a secretary of state who expressed private reservations about the administration's policy but never issued a public protest about the administration's course.

"Force should always be a last resort; I have preached this for most of my professional life as a soldier and as a diplomat; but it must be a resort," Mr. Powell told the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 14, 2003. "We cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out, as Iraq is trying to do now."

Mr. Powell is described as having clashed in particular with Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Mr. Woodward describes as a "powerful, steamrolling force" advocating the war who was preoccupied with reports of links between Saddam Hussein and the Qaeda terrorist network. Mr. Powell regarded Mr. Cheney's intense focus on Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda as a "fever," the book says, and he believed that the vice president misread and exaggerated intelligence about the Iraq threat and supposed terrorist ties.

Mr. Woodward's account quickly provoked speculation in Washington that Mr. Powell might have cooperated with Mr. Woodward as the book was being prepared in an effort to distance himself from the Iraq war.

A spokesman for Mr. Powell said Friday night that he could not determine whether the secretary had spoken with Mr. Woodward.

Mr. Powell has made no secret in the past that he has helped Mr. Woodward with other books. Only Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are identified by the author as having given on-the-record interviews for the book. But conversations between Mr. Powell and Mr. Bush are quoted verbatim in the book, and in the account of the January 2003 conversation, Mr. Bush is identified only as a corroborating source.

Richard A. Boucher, Mr. Powell's spokesman, declined to comment on the book, saying he had not read it and adding: `We won't do book reviews. I promise." Asked if it were true that Mr. Powell and Mr. Cheney were barely on speaking terms, Mr. Boucher said, "I think that's not true."

An official in Mr. Cheney's office said Friday that the vice president and his spokesman were flying back to the United States from a weeklong trip to Asia and would not be available for comment on Friday evening.

The 443-page book, published by Simon & Schuster and to be available in bookstores next week, provides the most detailed account to date of debate and tension within the administration before the war, but it does not add any broad new story lines. The Associated Press published an account of the book's contents on Friday morning; The New York Times also obtained a copy.

In a note to readers, Mr. Woodward writes that he based the book on information "from more than 75 key people directly involved in the events," a model he has used in other books. Following that model, the book does not include footnotes or otherwise identify the source of specific information. When he attributed thoughts, judgments or feelings to participants, Mr. Woodward writes, he obtained them from the person, a colleague with firsthand knowledge, or the written record.

In Mr. Woodward's account of the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell in January 2003, the president is described as having simply informed the secretary of state of his decision to go to war in Iraq, as part of a 12-minute meeting in which Mr. Bush made a conscious decision not to ask Mr. Powell for advice.

But, according to the book, Mr. Bush did ask Mr. Powell "Are you with me on this?" and told him, "I want you with me." Mr. Powell is quoted as having replied: "I'll do the best I can. Yes sir, I will support you. I'm with you, Mr. President."

The book discloses that Mr. Bush privately asked Mr. Rumsfeld in November 2001, just 72 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, to direct his commanders to begin planning for a possible war against Iraq. But it says that Mr. Bush did not make his final decision to start the war until January 2003. (In a televised news conference on March 6, Mr. Bush said, "I've not made up our mind about military action.")

Asked about the account on Friday at a joint appearance with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Mr. Bush said it was difficult for him to recall specific dates that far back. But he called attention to a meeting at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, on Sept. 15, 2001, the Saturday after the attacks.

"I sat down with my national security team to discuss the response, and the subject of Iraq came up," Mr. Bush told reporters. "And I said as plainly as I possibly could: `We'll focus on Afghanistan. That's where we'll focus."'

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, confirmed on Friday that Mr. Bush had raised the issue of Iraq with Mr. Rumsfeld in November 2001, at a time when American forces were still heavily engaged in the war in Afghanistan. But Mr. McClellan sought to minimize the significance of those discussions, saying that "there is a difference between planning and making a decision."

The exact timing of Mr. Bush's request to Mr. Rumsfeld to begin war planning had not been publicly known, and it had not been known that, as the book reports, Mr. Bush kept that request secret from other top advisers, including Mr. Powell, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

But the general time line for war planning that is presented in the book is broadly consistent with other recent accounts, including public statements by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the retired commander of the Iraq war. It generally upholds the insistence by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they did not begin their war planning for Iraq until well after the Sept. 11 attacks, even if their attention was fixed on Iraq from early in the administration, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has written in a recent book.

In an interview with Mr. Woodward in December 2003, Mr. Bush said he had kept the early war-planning directive secret because if news of it had leaked out, it would have caused "enormous international angst and domestic speculation," the book says.

The book also provides new details about the hurriedly arranged airstrike on March 19, 2003, in which the White House jump-started the war with a bomb and missile strike on the Dora Farms compound near Baghdad in a failed attempt to kill Mr. Hussein.

The air raid, advocated by Mr. Tenet, had initially been opposed by General Franks, the book says, but was approved by President Bush and Vice President Cheney after they asked other advisers to leave the Oval Office.

The strike was launched, the book says, on the basis of first-hand reports from Iraqi sources at Dora Farms enlisted by a network of 87 Iraqi spies, designated with the code name DB/ROCKSTARS, who had been recruited by a C.I.A. team that had infiltrated northern Iraq in the months before the war.

In calls by satellite phone to the C.I.A. team, the Iraqi sources reported that Mr. Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay were at the compound, and that Mr. Hussein himself would return there. After the strike, the book says, one Iraqi source reported Mr. Hussein's body had been removed from the wreckage, prompting Mr. Tenet to celebrate what he thought had been a success.

Even now, it is still not clear whether Mr. Hussein was at the site at all, though a C.I.A. official said on Friday that the agency maintained that Mr. Hussein was "probably" there and survived the American raid. Mr. Woodward's book reports that the Iraqi security guard who was the main source of the intelligence was killed in the American attack, but a C.I.A. official said that the Iraqi agents recruited by the agency had proved "extraordinarily productive."

Over a period that began in early 2002, Mr. Powell is depicted as having cautioned Mr. Bush and other advisers repeatedly about the potential drawbacks of military action in Iraq. The "you break it, you own it" principle he cited in delivering those warnings was privately known to Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, as "the Pottery Barn rule," the book says.

"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," Mr. Powell is said to have told Mr. Bush in the summer of 2002. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You'll own it all."

Conservatives have long accused Mr. Powell of pursuing his own agenda, and of being more interested in depicting himself as right on the issues than as loyal to his president.

Among the previously unknown episodes presented in the book was a White House meeting in December 2002 in which Mr. Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, met with Mr. Bush and his top advisers for what was intended as a dress rehearsal for a public presentation of the administration's claim that Iraq possessed illicit weapons.

Mr. Bush was not impressed by the presentation, the book reports, and urged that it be refined to make a stronger case to "Joe Public." He is said to have turned to Mr. Tenet and said, "I've been told all this intelligence about having W.M.D. and this is the best we've got?"

In response, Mr. Tenet is described in the book as having twice assured Mr. Bush that the intelligence information supporting the American claims meant that the case was a "slam dunk." A C.I.A. official said that Mr. Tenet was reflecting an assessment spelled out in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that declared unambiguously that Iraq possessed both chemical and biological weapons.