- WASHINGTON -- George Bush
set the US on the path to war in Iraq with a formal order signed in February
2002, more than a year before the invasion, according to a book published
yesterday.
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- The revelation casts doubt on the public insistence by
US and British officials throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken
to go to war, pending negotiations at the United Nations.
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- Rumsfeld's War is by Rowan Scarborough, the Pentagon
correspondent for the conservative Washington Times newspaper, which is
known for its contacts in the defence department's civilian leadership.
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- "On February 16 2002, Bush signed a secret national
security council directive establishing the goals and objectives for going
to war with Iraq, according to classified documents I obtained," Mr
Scarborough wrote, in an account of the "global war on terrorism"
as seen from the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary.
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- The next month, he writes, the head of central command,
General Tommy Franks, conducted a "major Iraq war exercise code-named
"Prominent Hammer", and in April he briefed the joint chiefs
of staff on the invasion plan.
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- "Franks's plan called for 200,000 to 250,000 troops
and a two-front land war... striking from Kuwait and from Turkey,"
the book says.
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- The national security council refused to comment on the
book's claims about the February directive. "I don't do book reviews,"
a White House official said.
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- Ivo Daalder, an official in Bill Clinton's national security
council, said a national security presidential directive was "the
most formal way that decisions by the president and others are communicated
to the rest of the government."
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- Rumsfeld's War reproduces excerpts from a secret Defence
Intelligence Agency briefing document in July 1999 about future threats
to the US.
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- It portrays Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a threat only if
sanctions were lifted. But the administration decided that neither inspections
nor sanctions were working, partly as a result of later discredited reports
that Saddam had stockpiled WMDs.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1154473,00.html
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