A Few of the President’s Men: Woodward’s ‘The War Within’

In “The War Within” (Simon & Schuster, 487 pages, $32), the fourth volume of Bob Woodward’s war quartet, he makes a number of key observations about the way President Bush has handled the Iraq surge. Mr. Woodward has discovered that, while in public, the president and his administration maintained a confident outlook about the prospect of victory evan as, behind the scenes, over time they became concerned at the lack of progress in pacifying the warring factions and the Al Qaeda-inspired forces in Iraq.A difference between the public face and the private debate among warriors is hardly uncommon. It is a prerequisite of war management that morale is maintained even during difficult times, and that arguments over strategy are not made public for fear of abetting the enemy.That the president came to differ with his colleagues over the number of troops needed in Iraq, including dispensing with the advice of Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who paradoxically were both hawkish and advocated the maintenance of fewer forces, we also already know.As we do the fact that the president fell out with the commander in the field, General George W. Casey Jr., who wished to keep to the original war aim of training Iraqi forces to defend their own country before withdrawing American troops. That is why General Casey was abruptly replaced by General David Petraeus.That the president took a great deal of time to decide the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Chase strategy was not working, and an even longer time determining what should replace it, is also familiar. The midterm elections of 2006 proved an important impediment to any precipitate change in course, including whether and when to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld with Robert M. Gates.A fourth “revelation,” that the president found it difficult to bring together the competing voices within his administration, what Mr. Woodward describes as “knocking their heads together,” is also known. What Mr. Woodward provides is the exact who, what, where, and when of a larger picture that has mostly been well described in the press.President Bush’s conduct of the war is hardly exceptional. The greatest of our commanders in chief, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, all shared an inability to get what they wanted the first time around. Mr. Woodward’s principal charge against the president — and the publishers, he suggests, insisted he judge Mr. Bush rather than merely report the facts — is that Mr. Bush was disengaged from the process of formulating detailed policy, often not attending key meetings, and preferred to leave such matters to his trusted aide, the national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.This, too, is hardly a hanging offense. Some leaders, such as Reagan, delegate; others, such as Margaret Thatcher, micromanage. There is no right approach. Both have their place.In his collation of myriad meetings, memos, encounters, discussions, arguments, scuffles, telephone calls, and video conferences, Mr. Woodward so drowns the reader in clutter that few arguments, except the obvious, emerge. Worse, key elements of the story of the surge are left out simply because, unless a source spoke to Mr. Woodward, their point of view has been omitted.There is, for instance, the conspicuous absence of Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, who are barely mentioned in 437 pages. It may be that when their strategy was deemed redundant they merely shrugged and said, “I disagree, but obviously that’s your call,” as Mr. Cheney is reported to have told the president.And Mr. Rumsfeld, who had honorably offered his resignation twice after the emergence of the disgusting acts perpetrated by American forces at Abu Ghraib, may also have given up without a whimper, suggesting to Mr. Bush he would inevitably come to need “new eyes, new ears.”But did these bulldozers of men really surrender that easily? And if they did, how did they think the belated “surge” turned out? Did they ever come to admit their original strategy had failed? Mr. Woodward does not address these questions, because Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld declined to talk to him.For at least two years before the surge, Senator McCain had been advocating just such a course. A vocal critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, he persistently urged the abandonment of the small-force strategy. Mr. Woodward alludes to a number of meetings between the president and Mr. McCain to discuss this. As the president belatedly adopted Mr. McCain’s position, what was said in these meetings is surely central to any history of the surge.Yet the to and fro between the president and Mr. McCain is relayed in a single page, and Mr. Bush declines to tell what was said during the meetings, or whether he regretted not having heeded Mr. McCain’s advice sooner. Because the president hid behind the mantra “history will have to judge,” and because Mr. McCain declined to grant Mr. Woodward an interview, this central aspect of the surge’s birth, adoption, and implementation is also missing.Then there is the core element absent from his account of the surge: the “top secret operations” Mr. Woodward says were essential to its success. What exactly these “top secret operations” are Mr. Woodward is not at liberty to discuss. As he told Larry King, “senior people in the military … said you can’t write about this. This will get people killed.”The importance of what the author has called “these top secret operations, which some day in history will be described, to peoples’ amazement,” cannot be underestimated. “I somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II, which led to the atomic bomb,” he told Mr. King. The Manhattan Project? Yikes.A secret weapon that totally changed the outcome of the surge and, he says, may yet lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden, yet he cannot write about it? Fair enough. In which case, surely a responsible historian should bide his time. What otherwise is the value of writing a history of the surge if the reason for its success cannot be discussed?nwapshott@nysun.com

A Few of the President’s Men: Woodward’s ‘The War Within’

A Few of the President’s Men: Woodward’s ‘The War Within’

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