Bob Woodward Criticizes Iraq Reporting

[Khephra]

NEW YORK -- The news media should have been more skeptical of President Bush's "zeal" to go to war with Iraq and the possibly "skimpy" prewar intelligence Bush used to justify the invasion, journalist Bob Woodward said Wednesday.

Woodward, author of a best-selling account of the 16 months leading to the war, said at a lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations that Bush believed it was his duty to overthrow former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"I believe we have a duty to free people and liberate people," Woodward said Bush told him during interviews for his book "Plan of Attack."

Bush, who began his presidency as an opponent of "nation building," now has a "zeal" to liberate oppressed people across the globe, Woodward said. "He wants his work, his administration, his presidency painted on a large canvas," the journalist said.

In a lesser-reported fact from his book, Woodward said, the White House spied on former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, who has said that the justifications for the Iraq war were unfounded.

"One of the things that's gone unnoticed (in `Plan of Attack') is ... national intelligence assets spying on Hans Blix," he said. "And Bush was getting these reports and felt that there was incongruity between what Blix was saying publicly and what he was actually doing. It makes it very clear we were wiretapping Hans Blix."

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