Dan Froomkin: Bush Tells a Tale

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Bush Tells a Tale

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, January 12, 2007; 5:14 PM

President Bush is pushing a revisionist explanation of how he came to support an escalation of troop strength in Iraq.

"The Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we've got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work. . . .

"The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to -- by the way, that's what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don't want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won't work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence. . . .

"And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, Mr. President, it's not going to work until -- unless we support -- provide more troops. And so last night I told the country that I've committed an additional -- a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad."

It was a bold attempt by Bush to rebut the widely-reported story that he stopped listening to his commanders -- and in fact, reassigned some -- when they stopped telling him what he wanted to hear.

But Bush's new story lacks a certain important quality: Believability.

Previous reporting -- see, for instance, Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post on Wednesday -- has made it abundantly clear that adding U.S. troops was not an idea that emerged from the American commanders -- nor, for that matter, from the Iraqis.

And, as it turns out, two stories in this morning's New York Times add to the evidence. ....(more)

The rest of Froomkin's column is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html