Spelling out process that led to war

By | Sunday, October 12, 2008

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THE WAR WITHIN: A SECRET WHITE HOUSE HISTORY 2006-2008

By Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster, $32, 487 pages

REVIEWED BY CLAUDE R. MARX

Assessing and debating how the Iraq war has been executed are frequent pastimes these days. This usually involves second guessing other people's motives and playing the "what if" game.

Many people making these judgments aren't armed with the insider knowledge about the process that led up to many of the political and military decisions. If they had, the verdict on the Bush administration might well be even harsher than it already is.

Many previous books and articles (including several by Bob Woodward) spelled out the dysfunctional nature of the decision-making process. However, after reading "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008," one concludes that some of the administration's successes in the war took place in spite of itself.

Mr. Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor of The Washington Post, has again performed a valuable public service by taking readers behind the scenes in the war council meetings and other high-level sessions. The result is a depressing picture of the infighting in the senior and middle levels of the Bush administration (to be fair, somewhat endemic to all presidencies) and a positive verdict on the military's performance and the judgment of some of its top brass.

Mr. Bush's firmness of belief (sometimes another word for stubbornness) and inattention to detail are very much in evidence throughout, much to the dismay of his staff members.

"The president had little patience for briefings. 'Speed it up. This isn't my first rodeo,' he would say often to those presenting. It was difficult to brief him because he would interject his own narrative, questions or off-putting jokes. Presentations and discussions rarely unfolded in a logical, comprehensive fashion. [State Department Senior Adviser/Coordinator for Iraq David] Satterfield thought this reflected insecurity in Bush. The president was a bully," Mr. Woodward writes.

As in previous books, the author does not always disclose his sources but it is generally not hard to guess, and those who cooperated generally get rewarded with better (or sometimes less harsh) treatment than those who did not.

Gen. David Petraeus, a long-time source of the author, is depicted as a scholarly (he has a doctorate from Princeton University) and visionary leader, albeit one who is eager to stay in the limelight and not afraid to upstage his bosses.

Mr. Woodward's engaging and fast-paced narrative gives the Petraeus-led surge much of the credit for the recent improvements in the region. While conditions are hardly ideal, they are markedly better than they were in 2006, when the problems in Iraq caused both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the GOP majority in Congress to lose their jobs.

Included is a fascinating, almost blow-by-blow account, of how the administration adopted the new strategy. The surge was opposed by many important officials, including both the commander on the ground Gen. George W. Casey and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Mr. Woodward focuses on the key role that retired Gen. Jack Keane (quite likely a source who leaked like a proverbial sieve) played in lobbying for the surge and encouraging the hiring of Gen. Petraeus. Once Gen. Petraeus took over, Gen. Keane continued to help him by lobbying Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, much to the frustration of Gen. Petraeus' superiors in the chain of command and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the increasingly marginalized Chairman Gen. Peter Pace.

The Bush administration has refuted some of Mr. Woodward's conclusions and his allegations that the president was overly optimistic when discussing the war's progress with the American people. But according to one scene in the book, Mr. Bush agreed with House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, Missouri Republican, when the lawmaker told the president "you have no credibility on communicating about Iraq."

Mr. Woodward's practice of re-creating scenes, including extensive dialogue, when he wasn't in attendance has been criticized in the past and is very much in evidence throughout the book. It's great for readers to feel like they are a fly on the wall, but some of the scenes are so tilted to make one of the participants look good or bad that they became opportunities for score settling.

The other key shortcoming is that because Mr. Woodward portrayed the president favorably in his first two books on the Iraq war, he seems to be overcompensating by not cutting the president much slack. While Mr. Bush has made lots of mistakes in the planning and execution of the war, he did get some things right and, more important, there have been no attacks on American soil since 9/11.

Overall, however, "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008" does an effective job of breaking down the important events of the last two years and, just as important, is an enjoyable read.

c Claude R. Marx is a Washington writer.

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