Word: requested
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...South Vietnamese allies won the battle, but it proved an empty victory. The American public perceived the attack as a sign that the war was amounting to endless folly. The U.S. military's request for 206,000 more troops became politically infeasible. Tet played a role in L.B.J.'s decision not to seek re-election. And young Army Major Colin Powell would later incorporate Tet's message into his doctrine that the U.S. should fight a war only with decisive force and vital interests at stake. --By Daren Fonda
...late December 2001, chief presidential speechwriter Mike Gerson made a simple request whose repercussions would be felt around the world. "Here's an assignment," he told his colleague David Frum. "Can you sum up in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq?" President Bush had yet to decide to target Saddam Hussein, but he was moving in that direction and wanted a rationale for overthrowing Saddam in his State of the Union address. As Frum wrote later in his book, The Right Man, "I was to provide a justification...
...everyone knew what he meant.) Republican congressional leaders, facing an election, fretted that the disarray would hurt them politically. At one point that spring, a senior White House official said in exasperation, "The dirty little secret of Iraq is that there is no plan." Rice, responding to a request by Democratic Senator Joe Biden for Administration officials to appear before his Foreign Relations Committee, was refreshingly blunt. "We're not ready yet," she told Biden, who held the hearings anyway. They were covered widely as a preparation for war, to the consternation of Republican congressional leaders. Trent Lott, then Senate...
...days later, on Martin Luther King Day, Powell--at de Villepin's request--attended a Security Council session that was to debate terrorism. The meeting was relatively uneventful, though Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, said a military strike against Iraq would make fighting terrorism more difficult. But at the press conference afterward, de Villepin dropped his bomb. France, he said, thought that "nothing justifies envisaging military action." It was the plainest signal possible that so long as the inspectors were getting cooperation from Saddam, Paris would not support...
Tenet rushed to the Pentagon and briefed Rumsfeld on the report; the two called the White House to request a meeting with the President. An hour later Bush met with Tenet, Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Air Force General Richard Myers and the other members of the war council--including Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Cheney and White House chief of staff Andrew Card. From his headquarters in Qatar, Franks dialed in over a secure line. The rest of the group spent the next three hours shuttling in and out of the Oval Office, discussing what...