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Woodward takes a stick to Rumsfeld

As FP says in a piece published today, there are few people who know the goings-on in Washington like veteran reporter and author Bob Woodward.

Writing as guest columnist on FP, Woodward takes a stick to Donald Rumsfeld's book Known and Unknown:

"On page 527 of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld recounts what he says was an exchange on Oct. 14, 2003 with Condoleezza Rice who was then Bush's national security adviser. She apologized for a flap over Iraq policy at the time.

You're failing," Rumsfeld said.

"Don, you've made mistakes in your long career," she replied.
"Yes, but I've tried to clean them up," he said.

Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others -- including President Bush -- distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash.

The Iraq War is essential to the understanding of the Bush presidency and the Rumsfeld era at the Pentagon. In the book, Rumsfeld tries to push so much off on Bush. That is fair because Bush made the ultimate decisions. But the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires -- facts he has completely left out of his memoir."

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