August 18, 2003: Former Diplomat Says Bush Decided To Go to War under Pressure from Rumsfeld

Brady Kiesling, a former political counselor at the US embassy in Athens who resigned from his post in protest of the invasion of Iraq (see Late February 2003), writes in an open letter published in the Greek daily, To Vima, that President George W. Bush is a “very weak” man and that his decision to invade Iraq was made under pressure from Donald Rumsfeld, who used the war to increase his own power. “Easy to convince, [Bush] blindly believed in Rumsfeld’s assurances that the occupation of Iraq would pay for itself,” the former diplomat writes. [Agence France-Presse, 8/17/2003 Sources: John Brady Kiesling]