Just posted by GNN: Long time Bush family friend and ghostwriter shares insights from 20 interviews with candidate Bush:
Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected: GNN exclusive by Russ Baker
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: `One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, `My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, `If I have a chance to invade....if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake," Herskowitz said. "That was one of the keys to being a leader."
More beneath the fold.
Herskowitz was eventually pulled from the Bush biography because the campaign didn't think he was framing W positively enough. According to the author it was Bush's own accounts of his "floundering" business ventures and an unserved but "excused" final two years in the national guard that provoked Karen Hughes' displeasure. She ultimately provided the rewrite.
Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate "as-told-to" author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz's other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.
Read the article for Bush Sr.'s disapproval of the Iraq invasion & more.