Powell Points To Cheney's "Gestapo Office" for Bush's War

More from Newsweek excerpt: In Woodward's telling, Powell was increasingly disappointed by the veep and others.

"Powell thought that Cheney had the fever," Woodward writes. "The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Saddam and 9/11. It was a separate little government that was out there—Wolfowitz, [Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter)] Libby, [Under Secretary of Defense Douglas] Feith and Feith's 'Gestapo office,' as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first gulf war just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation."

Missing in action through much of "Plan of Attack" is Bush's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Armitage, Powell's No. 2 and close friend, was contemptuous of Rice. "He believed that the foreign-policy-making system that was supposed to be coordinated by Rice was essentially dysfunctional," writes Woodward. A blunt-spoken former Navy SEAL, Armitage criticized Rice to her face. According to Woodward, "Powell thought that Rice was more interested in finding someone to blame for the public airing of the problem than in fixing it."

"Plan of Attack" has echoes of "The March of Folly," Barbara Tuchman's 1984 book about how the United States stumbled into Vietnam.