Bob Woodward shares latest privileged information from the Oval Office
Mixed in among the White House aides, Washington sachems and four-star generals who populate Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush presidency is another central character: Woodward himself.
In one scene near the middle of “The War Within,” Woodward is interviewing President Bush while Stephen J. Hadley, Bush’s close associate and national security adviser, listens.
Bush is telling Woodward how he came to decide he needed to replace Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and notes, “It was evolutionary.”
“It’d be good to put that phrase” in the book, Hadley says.
“Steve would like you to use the word ‘evolutionary,’ ” Bush said with a laugh.
The exchange, and the fact that Woodward was granted a sit-down interview with Bush and his national security adviser, are signs of Woodward’s position in the media firmament.
Woodward is a writer of best-selling and closely read books, a keeper of secrets and a member of the Washington media establishment since he made his legend in the early 1970s as a young reporter breaking the Watergate scandal.
“The War Within” is his fourth book on the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq War, from the initial buildup in 2001 to the recent effort to reduce the disspiriting violence there.
His previous books — “Bush at War,” “Plan of Attack” and “State of Denial” — were all best sellers, and the latest edition fits the classic Woodward pattern in his Bush administration memoirs.
It boasts access to top officials and secret documents, relies on a legion of anonymous sources and sparked publicity with a few choice and previously unreported revelations.
For this latest installment, Woodward delves into the period over the past two years, beginning when the insurgent attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq seemed to be at their peak.
“The War Within” tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the White House and Pentagon changed military policy in Iraq in an effort to stem the violence. It’s based on dozens of interviews, eyes-only memos, notes from closed-door meetings and other materials that were passed into Woodward’s privileged journalistic hands.
“The War Within” starts with the gradual recognition in mid-2006 that the strategy in Iraq was failing, violence was up, political and economic progress were almost nonexistent and pessimism was rampant.
In response, Gen. George Casey, the commander in Iraq, and other generals wanted to gradually draw down U. S. forces and turn more responsibility over to the Iraqis.
Bush, his closest advisers and military brass and the members of the Iraq Study Group debated the point for months, wondering if this was the right thing to do. Is this essentially giving up on the war? And is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki the right horse to back?
Publicly, Bush and others at the White House and in the Green Zone were saying that everything was going well and there were no plans to change policy. But, Woodward reports, quietly and privately the National Security Agency’s Hadley and others had begun reviewing Iraq strategy and concluded that a change was needed.
Among the options on the table, a temporary buildup of troops to boost security in and around Baghdad, popularly known as a “surge,” gained the widest support in the White House.
In fact, the decision to move forward with the surge came from the White House and top Bush advisers, not from the Joint Chiefs of Staff or from the commanders in Iraq. This is one of the headline-generating revelations in the book.
The surge was put in place in spring 2007 under Gen. David H. Petraeus, and violence in Iraq has diminished significantly over the past 18 months. Woodward makes the point that yes, the surge contributed to the decline in violence, but it’s not the complete explanation for it. He notes the U. S. caught a break when Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his followers in his Mahdi Army to end their attacks on American troops.
And in Anbar province, thousands of Sunnis turned their back on al-Qaida and came over to the U. S. side.
Further, Woodward reveals that special operations efforts targeting key members of al-Qaida and other extremist groups played a big role in diminishing violence. And, in another news morsel, Woodward shares that the United States has been spying on its putative ally, Maliki, though some wonder if Maliki already knew he was under surveillance.
If there is a criticism of “The War Within,” it’s that the meetings, memos and the various military and political officials who come and go in the book can seem to blur together. It is thoroughly researched, however, and Woodward at times reaches some hard-hitting conclusions about Bush.
“For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut,” Woodward writes near the end.
However, “The War Within” is perhaps too tightly focused and doesn’t have the historical and intellectual sweep of such military analyses as “Black Hawk Down,” “A Bright Shining Lie,” “The Best and the Brightest” or “The Guns of August.”
Nevertheless, Woodward’s book — which was shrouded in secrecy almost as strict as the war strategy the author wrote about — has drawn a lot of attention in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere. News coverage has focused on the discord between the White House and the generals, the spying on Maliki and the special operations campaign.
Woodward has been challenged in the past for being too sympathetic toward Bush in his series of histories of the Bush administration. In fact, before the release of “The War Within,” the irreverent 236.com blog posted an article that referred to it as the fourth in his “Stuff the White House told me that I wrote down” book series.
Why do people talk to him? To burnish their reputations, perhaps, with an eye on their legacy and the chance to put their own spin on major decisions.
What a long way that is from the time that Woodward and his fellow Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein, were taking on the establishment with their Watergate reporting. He was an inspiration to a whole generation of young people who read or watched “All the President’s Men,” and decided to get into journalism and challenge the status quo.
That book, and their follow-up “The Final Days,” were an inspiration for me, too.
“The War Within” is written at a different time, by a different Woodward, who is clearly as much a part of the Washington establishment as the officials he interviews.
The War Within: A Secret White House History
2006-2008
By Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster
487 pages, $32
Stephen T. Watson is a News staff reporter. swatson@buffnews.com
