A one-term President?

No, no.

I’m not referring to our President GMA. I’m talking about the possibility that United States President George W. Bush, a.k.a. Dubya Bush, may succumb to the "Bush Curse" (which downed his dad) and not be re-elected this coming November.

I’ve been reading Bob Woodward’s instant bestseller, hot off the press, entitled, Plan of Attack, which has just created a tsunami of controversy and political comment in Washington, DC, and around the USA – not to mention the capitals of Europe.

Why such a reaction? Because Woodward, a reporter and editor at the powerful Washington Post for the past 33 years, was one of the two journalists (the other was Carl Bernstein) who had exposed the Watergate cover-up and scandal in 1973-74, which led to the downfall of US President Richard M. Nixon.

Will Plan lead to IraqGate for Dubya? Perhaps not – but it has shaken the White House to the very foundations of the Oval office, and thrown the Cabinet into turmoil and suspicion over who ratted to Bob (one of the chief suspects being Colin Powell).

If you’ll recall, shortly after the attack on Afghanistan, Woodward produced a blockbuster, Bush at War (also Simon & Schuster, New York, 2002) detailing the secret deliberations of the National Security Council and how, behind-the-scenes, Bush and his top men and women, after the initial shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, "led the nation to war".

Remember, it was the Afghan war (if you recall that conflict) which Woodward was speaking about.

Based on interviews with over a hundred sources and four hours of exhaustive interviews with Bush himself, Woodward had tried to explain Bush’s "sweeping, almost grandiose, vision for remaking the world".

He had also outlined the differences in style and attitude between Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the reluctant ex-soldier, State Secretary Colin Powell. As he revealed in that volume, Bush had declared: "I’m not a textbook player, I’m a gut player."

You bet.

This is confirmed in this latest opus, in which Woodward, after interviewing 75 key participants and over three and a half hours of exclusive interviews with Bush himself, shows how intelligence estimates of those never-found WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) went awry, and how, over 16 critical months, and top-secret war planning under the restricted codename "Polo Step", America plunged into a war to topple Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein. It may not yet be like the quaagmire of Vietnam, but America is now stuck (with 700 service men and women dead . . . and counting) in the quicksand of Iraq.

Woodward even has a fascinating spy story woven into the book – a tale about how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sometimes bruited about as Central Intelligence Amoks, sent a covert paramilitary team into Iraq six months before the March 20, 2003, assault on that country – and the 21-day dash to Baghdad. The CIA insertion team recruited 87 Iraqi spies, designated with the cryptogram DB/ROCKSTARS. One of the recruits turned over the personnel files of all 6,000 men in Saddam’s personal security organization.

* * *

You’ll have to read that interesting book itself (I don’t intend to review it), because it’s a darned good read.

However, there’s a touching epilogue which throws much-needed light on George "Dubya" Bush’s character. You can’t say Bob Woodwar is partial to Bush; in fact he’s always been a bit of a curmudgeon with regard to Dubya and his merry men (and his less-than-merry National Security Adviser gal, the redoubtable Condoleezza Rice).

Indeed, he delivers a tough indictment on Rice while not downgrading her obvious talents. It is found on pages 441 and 442. Woodward points out that Rice had doubts about the CIA’s earlier reports on WMDs, intensified by CIA Director George Tenet’s admission to associates that the information that Saddam "possessed biological and chemical weapons – the basis for war. . ." was not firm. Tenet had observed, reluctantly it seems, I "that the evidence was not ironclad, that it did not include a smoking gun".

Wow!

Rice, said Woodward, was troubled about the failure to find Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). As he put it, "She knew intelligence is not fact." On the following page, the journalist notes that "as national security adviser, Rice did not dare try to influence the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate, but given her closeness and status with Bush, if anyone could have warned the president to moderate his own categorical statements about WMD, it was Rice."

"But Cheney had effectively pre-empted that issue on August 26, 2002, when he declared there was ‘no doubt’ Iraq had WMD."

* * *

In the final paragraphs of Plan of Attack, though, Woodward reveals that "the one theme that emerged in all the hours I spent interviewing the president and the hundreds of hours I spent interviewing others close to him or involved in the Iraq War decisions is Bush’s conviction that he made the right decision."

In the second interview with Bush, on December 11, 2003, Woodward recounts the US President had said he had once told Condoleezza Rice: "I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right." He asserted: "I was going to act. And if it cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so."

Woodward then asked Bush if it was true that at one of the meetings in the run-up to war, Bush had really stated, "I would like to be a two-term president, but if I am a one-term president, so be it."

"That’s right," the US President had replied, "That is my attitude."

"And if this decision costs you the election?" Bob had persisted in inquiring.

"The presidency – that’s just the way it is," Bush replied. "Fully prepared to live with it."

In a poignant passage, Woodward concludes: "That day, after two hours, we stood in the Oval Officer and started to walk out. Darkness was beginning to settle outside. The upcoming presidential election would perhaps be the most immediate judgement on the war, but certainly not the last. How would history judge his Iraq War? I asked.

"It would be impossible to get the meaning right in the short run, the president said, adding he thought it would take about ten years to understand the impact and true significance of the war."

Woodward quoted Bush’s adviser Karl Rove as believing that "all history gets measured by outcomes".

"Bush smiled. ‘History,’ he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was far off. We won’t know. We’ll all be dead."

Dead. What a way to conclude a book! Yet Bush comes out of it all like . . . well . . . a true President. Someone who puts himself on the line, making tough decisions, not wavering or waffling. Right or wrong, he stands tall. There’s sand in his craw.

He’s a President, it’s well known, who begins every Cabinet meeting with a prayer. Bring "democracy" to Iraq? It took Americans more than a hundred years and a bloody, cruel Civil War, to define democracy in their own land, and among their own people.

But George "Dubya" Bush did what he thought was right – right or wrong. That’s something.

* * *

You’ve got to give it to our President GMA. She rang me up yesterday – from Lubao, Pampanga, where they were celebrating Mikey’s 35th birthday. Mikey is, of course, Pampanga Vice Governor Juan Miguel Arroyo, who’s now running for a seat in the House of Representatives.

The President was ebullient. When I said she seemed to be forging ahead in the poll surveys, she enthused: "There’s more coming." She sounded super-charged, and full of energy.

Can’t tell you more about what we discussed. But one thing is clear. Super-Glo is accessible, and uses her cellphone for better things than throwing it at people.

There’s no doubt, with only two weeks to go, that she’s gaining ground in the homestretch of this election.

I asked her to guest on IMPACT 2004 on Friday, May 7th – just before election day. GMA replied, "Let’s check my campaign schedule."

Can her main challenger, the KNP’s FPJ, defeat her – with all the odds now being stacked against him?

It’s not only the Equity of the Incumbent, the overwhelming resources of the government, and the very iffy behavior of the Commission on Election with which Da King must contend in combating La Emperadora. It’s the fragmentation within his own phalanx, with ASOs, and Hawis, and the disappointed Young Mobilizers (what happened to Rep. Chis Escudero, his very eloquent and youthful spokesman of yore, who speaks no more?) et cetera. Is Ronnie really Da King in his own army? Those are the questions still to be answered, whether those NFO Trends, SWS, or Pulse Asia surveys are rigged or manipulated, or not, as both Panday’s boys and Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson’s men are hotly declaring.

Then there are the unity talks which dismally failed to materialize yesterday. The last chance, the final opportunity will – reportedly – be tomorrow, Wednesday, then the two, by coincidence (?) will be in Zamboanga.

Oh, well. FPJ, too, has been invited to appear on Impact 2004. He couldn’t make it for a back-to-back with Lacson (who stole the show) last Friday. It’s now the countdown to the Last Two Minutes.

War is politics with bloodshed. Politics is war without bloodshed. That’s what Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, once observed. (In the Philippines, sometimes it’s both.) When you’re in battle and your artillery is stuck in the mud – like Napoleon’s in Waterloo – then it’s curtains for you. Where Is Panday da Hero’s artillery? Let’s hear it from him.