McClellan Says Bush Misled US on Iraq

WASHINGTON - In a book due out June 2, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan offers a blistering review of the Bush administration and concludes that his longtime boss misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq.

"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided --- that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong With Washington."

"No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact," he wrote in the preface. "What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

The White House declined to comment late Tuesday on the book by the longtime Bush aide, whose ties to the president date to his days as Texas governor. It questions Bush's intellectual curiosity, his candor in leading the nation to war and the quality of his advisers, and it points up what McClellan writes is a pattern of self-deception.

"As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq," McClellan wrote. "Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced."

McClellan left the White House in 2006 when he was forced out as the press secretary.

"President Bush has always been an instinctive leader more than an intellectual leader. He is not one to delve into all the possible policy options --- including sitting around engaging in extended debate about them --- before making a choice," McClellan wrote. "Rather, he chooses based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions. Such was the case with Iraq."

In an interview May 27, McClellan said he retains great admiration and respect for Bush.

"My job was to advocate and defend his policies and speak on his behalf," he said. "This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things. There were things we did right and things we did wrong. Unfortunately, much of what went wrong overshadowed the good things we did."

In the book, McClellan said Bush's top advisers, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "played right into his thinking, doing little to question it or cause him to pause long enough to fully consider the consequences before moving forward."

"Contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded," he wrote.

The president's real motivation for the war, he wrote, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region.

But the White House sought to sell the war as a response to a threat posed by Saddam Hussein because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East."

"President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," McClellan concluded, noting, "The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president's entire second term in office."