From NY Daily News
Book slams Rummy, Colin & others in bitter fighting over war
By Corky Siemaszko

While U.S. forces were battling in Baghdad, another war was being waged inside the West Wing.

In “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward describes a White House riven by rivalries where the President’s closest advisers were at one another’s throats - nearly literally in one instance - over how to wage war in Iraq.

There were “surreal” meetings where Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to look at each other while making their presentations to a fidgety President, Woodward writes.

Powell and Rumsfeld were like “bulls” who “staked out their ground, almost snorting defiantly, hoofs pawing the table, daring a challenge that never came,” Woodward wrote. “And the President, whose legs often jiggled under the table, did not force a discussion.”

he bad blood between Powell and Rumsfeld spilled over to their underlings. At one point, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage “barked” at Rumsfeld’s man, ex-Pentagon policy chief Douglas Feith.

“It was almost as if Armitage wanted to reach across the table and snap Feith’s neck like a twig,” Woodward wrote. “Armitage’s knuckles even turned white.”

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