Hoot of Attack: The Legs of Responsibility Tour

[Part of an ongoing series on Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," one of the best nonfiction dark comedies of war ever written. Today's hoots are from pp 356-363.]

March 16, 2003: Bush, Blair, and Aznar meet in the Azores to get their screw-the-UN-we're-going-to-war stories straight. The dudes are worried that France, Russia, or some other bastard Security Council member might introduce a counter-resolution that would foil their plans -- a diplomatically hostile act, Blair calls it. Bush grumbles that he'd "be glad to veto something of [the French]… really glad."

At a press conference, an astute reporter (not an oxymoron outside the United States), observes: "There's no possible way out through the United Nations because a majority does not a support a war action." The dudes do not contradict him.

"I was the guy that said they ought to vote," Bush said. "France showed their cards…. They said they were going to veto anything that held Saddam to account. So cards have been played, and we'll just have to take an assessment after tomorrow to determine what that card meant.

The dude-in-chief loves his poker analogies.

"In the post-Saddam Iraq, the UN will definitely need to have a role. And that way it can begin to get its legs, its legs of responsibility back."

He did not say in public what he had said in private to the other [dudesters], that the UN "should not run the country."

Road trip winding down, hijinks ensue on Air Force One as it heads back over the Atlantic.

[T]he president and the others were [watching] Mel Gibson's movie, Conspiracy Theory. Bush loudly summarized the plot, and during the rest of the movie made fun of it as fairly predictable.

Regrettably, the usually meticulous Woodward neglects to inform us whether Bush also threw popcorn at the screen during the mushy scenes between Mel and Julia.