Except for the fact that the crowd in the White House, however poorly it may do other things, like conducting a war, has a certain facility for pulling electoral victory from the jaws of defeat, Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, would almost seem like piling on. To be sure, Democrats had not been handed the Mark Foley fiasco before the book was ready to go on display in bookstores, and being hypocritical about protecting children might be easier to understand than a thousand mistakes and missed opportunities in Iraq or the convoluted dealings of Jack Abramoff.
What’s almost surprising is that despite being somewhat episodic and disjointed, reflecting more the perceptions of those who were willing to sit down with Woodward for extended interviews than other perceptions and actions that might have been more important, this is a pretty good book. Despite Woodward’s disingenuous stance that he simply does interviews and lets those who participated in great events have their say, this book has the feel of being at least a semi-final say on the Bush Man, and Woodward seems to have expended more than the usual amount of craftsmanship on this one.
Why might that have been?
The American Establishment is not a monolith, as many conspiracy-mongers prefer to believe, but more like a feudal kingdom, with barons, earls, hereditary and new-money aristocracies and various intellectual factions struggling for supremacy. So the publication, to great fanfare, of a new book by Bob Woodward essentially questioning – though in a reasonably even-handed way that gives many in the administration their due and perhaps more than their due – the Bush administration’s competence at waging war in Iraq and on terror suggests that portions of the establishment have had it up to here with Bush 43’s fecklessness.
Among them seem to be many of the “graybeards” that surrounded the current president’s father, and perhaps even the former president himself.
A couple of years ago, in Plan of Attack, Woodward offered a picture of an administration sometimes fumbling during the run-up to war but led by a president of admirable conviction, in firm control of the reins of power and sincerely determined to bring democracy to Iraq and transformation to the Middle East. Suggestive of its slant is the fact that while griping about some aspects of the portrayal, the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign made the book suggested reading.
Two years later, with the absence of WMDs acknowledged by all but a few cranks, no end in sight to the commitment in Iraq, the Middle East more roiled than before and Iran increasingly flexing its power – and just perhaps with a midterm congressional election weeks away – the picture Woodward chooses to see is different. In State of Denial, the president is portrayed as hopelessly out of touch, increasingly insulated, in large part by his own design, from questions about his policies even from those assigned to carry them out.
In this book Bush presides over an increasingly dysfunctional government riven by turf wars and personal feuds, that is unable to carry out simple tasks in Iraq because it doesn’t understand the facts on the ground and is virtually incapable, despite the latest high-tech gadgetry, of communicating within itself. Even in meetings ostensibly devoted to strategy and hard-headed assessment, the president is essentially a cheerleader, mouthing the same platitudes about staying the course and inevitable essential victory that he utters in public. No hard questions and sometimes no questions at all.
Woodward’s primary sources – his habitual reliance on unnamed sources inspires the caveats about accuracy and being spun by sources the reader isn’t told about that must accompany any recent Woodward book – suggest the orientation.
There’s Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, until recently ambassador to the U.S. and a Bush family intimate, former CIA director George Tenet, former Deputy Secretary of State and Colin Powell’s best friend Richard Armitage, Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the elder Bush and keeper of the Kissingerian flame, along with numerous mostly retired top military brass. This is heavy establishment artillery, not a passel of radical bloggers or ivory-tower professors.
The tidbits one comes to expect from a book written by the man almost any Washington player will talk to, especially anonymously, are here. There’s a surprising amount based on talking with Prince Bandar, for example, who Woodward reports was brought in by Poppy Bush to give sonny-boy tutorials on international relations in the real world rather than the academic world. Rumsfeld, an intrepid reformer in Woodward’s first book on Bushwar, is now a meddling micromanager who’s most adept at verbally slithering away from making definitive statements and avoiding accountability.
The meeting between Condi Rice and George Tenet, and his top terrorism expert, Cofer Black, in July 2001, is right there, and seems to have been confirmed as having taken place, though Condi remembers it differently, of course. But Tenet (p. 79), obviously one of Woodward’s prime sources, is allowed to muse self-protectively: “Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the bin Laden threat, but she just didn’t get there in time, Tenet thought. He felt he had done his job, laid it on the line very directly about the threat, but Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she wasn’t organized and didn’t push people as he tried to do at the CIA.”
Rumsfeld and Rice as well and Tenet and Rice were often at each other’s throats. There’s Rumsfeld the micromanager bent on “transformation” of the military (which still might not be a bad idea) who sent unsigned memos called “snowflakes” to people at all levels in the Pentagon. “Rumsfeld was into everyone’s business. No one was immune. Many in the Pentagon looked at the snowflakes as an annoyance. Others found them intrusive and at times petty. For some, there was no way to keep up.”
What might have worked in the private sector – although he traded on his government connections, Rumsfeld does seem to have had some legitimate success in the private sector – simply ruffled feathers and led people to dig in their heels in what is quite possibly the most entrenched and change-averse bureaucracy in the world. Which brings us to a point most readers have missed.
In many ways, perhaps unintentionally, this is the story not so much of a dysfunctional administration as a dysfunctional government. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis brought their own style, but the government is so huge and sprawling that one wonders if anybody could have run it effectively. With all the turf wars, bureaucracies working at cross-purposes, institutional rivalries (CIA-FBI, Defense-State, National Security Council vs. everybody else) its ineffectiveness seems inevitable.
There’s Jay Garner, the first Iraqi viceroy, surprisingly something of a hero here (he must have been accessible), with serious and specific criticisms of policy he expressed to others, but was unwilling to express to the president when he had a nice buddy-buddy-swap-stories-back-slapping session in the Oval Office when he left his post rather than sharing with the president some his misgivings.
Beyond a few juicy tidbits there’s little new here for those who have followed the war closely or dipped into books like Assassin’s Gate, The One-Percent Doctrine or Larry Diamond’s invaluable Squandered Victory. But it cobbles a lot of pieces together in an engaging way that might make it the best single-volume guide to what went wrong and is going wrong in Iraq.
