IRAQ - Bush Ignored Advice On Insurgency.

The New York Times on Sept. 30 highlighted a new book in which the White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser who said thousands of additional US troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there. The book by Bob Woodward, The Washington Post reporter and author, describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war. The warning is described in "State of Denial", scheduled for publication on Oct. 2 by Simon & Schuster.

The book says President Bush's top advisers were often at odds, and sometimes were barely on speaking terms, but shared a tendency to dismiss as too pessimistic assessments from US commanders and others about the situation in Iraq. As late as November 2003, Bush is quoted as saying of the situation in Iraq: "I don't want anyone in the cabinet to say it is an insurgency. I don't think we are there yet". Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is described as disengaged from the nuts and bolts of occupying and reconstructing Iraq - a task initially supposed to be under the direction of the Pentagon - and so hostile towards Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, that Bush had to tell him to return her phone calls.

Top US commander for the Middle East Gen Abizaid is reported to have told visitors to his headquarters in Qatar in the autumn of 2005 that "Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore" to make a public case for the US strategy in Iraq.

The book is the third Woodward has written chronicling inner debates in the White House after 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the decision to invade Iraq. Like Woodward's previous works, the book includes lengthy quotations from conversations and describes what senior officials are thinking at various times, without identifying the sources. Woodward says his book is based on "interviews with President Bush's national security team, their deputies, and other senior and key players in the administration responsible for the military, the diplomacy, and the intelligence on Iraq".

Neither Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney agreed to be interviewed, the book says. Robert Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memo sent to Rice. Blackwill's memo concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed. It says Blackwill and Paul Bremer, then the top US official in Iraq, later briefed Rice and Stephen Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops. It says the White House did nothing in response.

The book describes a deep fissure between Colin Powell, Bush's first secretary of state, and Rumsfeld: When Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, that "if I go, Don should go", referring to Rumsfeld. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by Bush, who feared it would disrupt the coming elections in Iraq and operations at the Pentagon.

Cheney is described as a man so determined to find proof that his claim about WMD in Iraq was accurate that, in the summer of 2003, his aides were calling the chief weapons inspector, David Kay, with specific satellite co-ordinates as the sites of possible caches. None resulted in any finds. Two members of Bush's inner circle, Powell and a former CIA director George Tenet, are described as ambivalent about the decision to invade Iraq. When Powell assented, reluctantly, in January 2003, Bush told him in an Oval Office meeting that it was "time to put your war uniform on", a reference to his many years in the army. Tenet apparently did not share his qualms about invading Iraq directly with Bush, according to Woodward's account.

Woodward's first two books about the Bush administration, "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack", portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, "State of Denial" follows a very different story line, of an administration which seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers. The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration.

Woodward writes that in the weeks before 9/11, Tenet believed that Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects which the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by al-Qaeda. The book details an exchange in early 2003 between Lt Gen Jay Garner, the retired officer Bush appointed to administer post-war Iraq, and Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the post-war mission. After Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation - which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure post-war Iraq, the book says - there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff. But it was Garner who was soon removed, in favour of Bremer, whose actions in dismantling the Iraqi Army and removing Ba'thists from office were later disparaged within the government.