In a new book due to be published next week, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President George W. Bush misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq, the New York Times reported Tuesday on its website.
"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," a 341-pagememoir, according to an advance copy obtained by the newspaper.
The book, which drew a "no comment" from the White House on Tuesday night, comes from a Texan picked by the president and paid by the people to help sell the war to the world.
The volume makes McClellan the first longtime Bush aide to put such harsh criticism in a book.
"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 worked for Bush from 1999, when he signed on as a deputy in the governor's press office, until 2006, when he was forced out as White House press secretary.
In a TV interview Tuesday, 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 -- subtitled "Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" -- McClellan said that 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".
He brands Vice President Dick Cheney as "the magic man" mysteriously directing outcomes in "every policy area he cared about, from the invasion of Iraq to expansion of presidential power to the treatment of detainees and the use of surveillance against terror suspects."
"Cheney always seemed to get his way," McClellan wrote.
Source:Xinhua
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