BOOK: Bush, The War, Part 3

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- In 1998, George W. Bush, then an aspiring presidential candidate, told Condoleezza Rice, ``I don't have any idea about foreign affairs.'' Eight years and tens of thousands of deaths later, he still doesn't, writes Bob Woodward in ``State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III.''
In Woodward's telling, no one in the administration ever pondered the possibility of failure in Iraq. As one worried general jotted down after an early planning meeting, ``Faulty assumptions. Overly optimistic. Lack of reality.''
Woodward's principal villain -- his Darth Vader -- is Donald Rumsfeld, whom Bush selected as his secretary of defense partly because his father couldn't stand him: ``It was a chance to prove his father wrong.'' Instead he proved him right.
Rumsfeld's managerial style is to chew out anyone who disagrees with him, so violently, humiliatingly and publicly that nobody wants to speak up. The secretary ``systematically emasculated'' the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ``thought he had won'' when ``strong, forceful military advice was bleached out of the system.''
Woodward describes the ``surreal quality'' of the presidential meetings that Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell both attended:
``Rumsfeld made his presentation looking at the president, while Powell looked straight ahead. Then Powell would make his to the president with Rumsfeld looking straight ahead.... So Bush never had the benefit of a serious, substantive discussion between his principal advisers.''
Stuff of Satire
Imagine what a great satirist could do with this bureaucratic tragicomedy. It's so rich that you can't help regretting that Woodward, competent and workaday, doesn't have the chops to rise to the material. Still, as a narrative of a dysfunctional administration in a crisis it refuses to recognize, ``State of Denial'' gets the job done.
Woodward leaves the withering assessment of the presumably more astute Powell to Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Forces Committee. Levin notes that Powell was ``at the peak of his influence'' when Bush asked him, in January 2003, to support the invasion. ``Can you imagine what would have happened if he'd said, `I've got to give that a little thought'? Can you imagine the power of that one person to change the course? He had it.''
Then there's Paul Bremer, who, when he took command of Iraq in May 2003, brushed off his predecessor's advice, adopting a policy of sweeping de-Baathification and disbanding the entire Iraqi military. With these two ``tragic decisions,'' he invited chaos -- who was left to run the ministries? to provide security? -- and assured the hostility of a multitude of consequential Iraqis. (Newt Gingrich later called Bremer ``the largest single disaster in American foreign policy in modern times.'')
Not Much News
All of this is interesting. Not much of it is news -- except maybe to Woodward, whose previous books about the administration have been so glowing that Woodward himself has been vilified by Frank Rich (among others) as a shill for Bush.
When Woodward assumes a tone of high dudgeon -- as he did on ``60 Minutes,'' the day after the book's release, and as he does when he writes that ``the real evidence of just how badly things were going ... was all kept classified, hidden away from the voting public'' -- you have to wonder who he thinks doesn't know what a mess the war has become. Not even fervent hawks are pretending the news is good, and the president's dwindling poll numbers tell the story of public opinion. Why, then, are so many in the media touting ``State of Denial'' as a revelation?
Controlling Information
Could it be out of shame and embarrassment? This White House has been relentless in its efforts to control information, equating the delivery of bad news with lack of patriotism. And the press, with a few notable exceptions, has been cowed. Nevertheless, Woodward's ``we are shocked, shocked'' demeanor is disingenuous. Propaganda, after all, is a government province. What administration hasn't engaged in it?
In a November 2003 speech, the president observed, ``The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increase dangers to the American people, and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region.'' Prescient words; but if now he stood before us and declared, ``And so it has,'' Americans would know that he had lost his mind. The responsibility for that kind of gloomy truth-telling in the face of sanctioned mendacity belongs to the press -- a press that, like its star Bob Woodward, almost monolithically rolled over for this administration shortly after Sept. 11. Now that defeat in Iraq flickers on the horizon, maybe a few more newspapers and networks will start doing their job again.
``State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III'' is published by Simon & Schuster (560 pages, $30).