“This was about getting past the election”
Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address – that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon – might not be true, according to government records and interviews.
Continue reading Insulating Bush by Murray Waas.
