US President George W Bush's former chief spokesman says in a new book that the Iraq war was unnecessary and sold to the US public with a deceptive propaganda campaign.
Released five months before November elections to decide Mr Bush’s successor, Scott McClellan's memoir 'What Happened' has sent shockwaves through Washington.
'As I have heard Bush say, only a wartime president is likely to achieve greatness,' Mr McClellan writes. 'In Iraq, Bush saw his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness,' he adds.
Mr McClellan was the second of Mr Bush's four press secretaries to date.
The former aide writes that history and the US public seem to agree that the March 2003 invasion 'was a serious strategic blunder' and accuses top Bush aides of sidelining inconvenient truths in their rush to sell the war.
The US president wanted to topple Saddam Hussein 'primarily for the ambitious purpose of transforming the Middle East,' but knew that the US public would never agree to send troops into harm's way for that purpose, he says.
So 'the administration chose a different path - not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth; downplaying the major reason for going to war and emphasising a lesser motivation that could arguably be dealt with in other ways (such as intensified diplomatic pressure),' he said.
They pumped up the case for war with 'innuendo and implication' while 'quietly ignoring or disregarding' evidence against it.
The former spokesman also denounced the response to Hurricane Katrina and the outing of a covert CIA agent by top Bush aides, a scandal that embroiled Mr McClellan and eventually led to his departure from the White House.
Mr McClellan, a Texas native from a political family, went to work for Mr Bush when the future president was the state's governor.
He was a spokesman for Mr Bush's 2000 campaign, and served as deputy White House press secretary from January 2001 to July 2003, when he became the president’s lead spokesman.
He resigned in April 2006; his credibility battered amid the scandal over the leak that Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA agent.
Mr McClellan accuses former top White House political strategist Karl Rove and Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, once a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, of misleading him into publicly denying they played any role in the revelation.
