Bush ‘Political Comeback Memoir’ Exposes Israeli Strike on Syria
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
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and .Former U.S. President George W. Bush began a media blitz Monday prior to tomorrow’s debut of his memoir that states for the first time what everyone knew unofficially – Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear site three years ago.
The book, called “Decision Points,” is being promoted on popular talk shows in the United States and Britain one week after the American mid-term elections that dramatically reversed voter’s rejections of the Bush administration two years ago.
"The statute of limitations has passed for attacking President Bush," a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, told The New York Times. Bush’s popularity was down to 25 percent when he left office.
Among the 14 chapters, Bush stated that then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert asked him to bomb the nuclear site under construction in Syria. "George, I'm asking you to bomb the facility," Bush quoted Olmert as asking.
After consulting with security officials, American officials rejected the request as well as a covert operation, which they said would be too risky for American soldiers. Bush accepted officials’ analyses that although the site was definitely for a nuclear reactor, it was not clear that Syrian President Bashar Assad intended to manufacture a nuclear weapon.
"I cannot justify an attack on a sovereign nation unless my intelligence agencies stand up and say it's a weapons program," Bush told Olmert, who replied, "Your strategy is very disturbing to me.”
Bush added in his book that Israel bombed the facility without asking for a “green light” from the United States. "He had done what he believed was necessary for Israel's security," Bush added.
The former wrote favorably of the military strike, saying its success "made up for the confidence I had lost in the capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces during their 2006 war against Hizbullah in Lebanon."
Other parts of Bush’s book deal with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, stem cells, the Katrina hurricane disaster and the financial crisis.
(IsraelNationalNews.com)
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