Thomas Powers, 'Bush at War': Behind the Scenes, an Ad Hoc Campaign nytimes.com
[ Review of Woodward's book. Clips: ]
What's remarkable about Woodward's book is the same thing that was remarkable about many of his others -- extraordinary access to secret documents, like contemporaneous notes of National Security Council meetings, and to high officials, including President Bush, who submitted to a 2-hour-25-minute interview of lively give and take. Woodward says he himself asked questions or interjected comments 300 times. Also quoted repeatedly in the book are many other officials -- the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage; Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz; Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and his chief counterterrorism expert, Cofer Black. But the rules of the game mostly prevent Woodward from naming his sources, which, in any given instance, might be an official document or something remembered by a cabinet secretary or the recollection of words overheard by an assistant two or three levels down the food chain.
In one typical example, Woodward describes a National Security Council meeting on Oct. 16 in which Rumsfeld insisted that the military was following the C.I.A.'s strategy in Afghanistan. Oh no, Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin, said, ''our guys work with the CINC'' -- that is, the commander in chief in the field, Gen. Tommy R. Franks. ''We're supporting the CINC. The CINC is in charge.''
''No,'' Rumsfeld countered, ''you guys are in charge. . . . We're going where you tell us to go.''
After the meeting, according to Woodward, Rice took Rumsfeld aside and said, ''Don, this is now a military operation and you really have to be in charge.''
The earlier quotations might have come from N.S.C. minutes, but what about Rice's chiding of Rumsfeld for being sulky? It would be nice to know who told Woodward that, but more important is the question whether it is true. . . .
It's hard to quarrel with a war won in 10 weeks, but Woodward's book implicitly cautions us not to expect the same in Iraq. Tipping the balance against the Taliban with small, mobile teams worked in Afghanistan, but barely. In Iraq, there is no equivalent of the Northern Alliance; the army may choose to fight instead of run, unwise as that would be; and the Bush team may find itself facing the two things it dislikes most -- American casualties and the prospect of a season in the swamp called nation building. Whatever the difficulties and challenges, Woodward suggests that we should expect the administration to figure them out as it goes along, and not until it has to.
But for all the lively interest of Woodward's portraits of Bush and his team arguing how to fight the war on terror, perhaps the most important parts of the debate were the things on which ''the principals'' in the war cabinet had little to say. As you might guess, these are mainly questions with soft edges: In the war on terror who, exactly, is the enemy? What is the source of the anger that prompted Al Qaeda to such bloody attacks? Why does the administration assume that ''any serious, full-scale war against terrorism would have to make Iraq a target''? Will victory over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein be the end of it? What is going on in the collective mind of the Islamic world as it watches America crush one Muslim regime after another? Answers to these questions would help us to understand where we can expect to find ourselves in 10 or 20 years' time, but about them, in Woodward's book, President Bush and his team rarely speak. |
