Good review of Woodward's Book, "Bush at War" in the NYT today. I post it because if gives a good summary of how the admin thouht through the first 100 days. Carl, you are concerned about "top down" guidance and Rumsfeld vs the Generals. This review shows Woodward's outline of how they really operate.
December 15, 2002
'Bush at War': Behind the Scenes, an Ad Hoc Campaign
By THOMAS POWERS
[T] he 100-day campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan, summed up a year after the fall of Kabul, seems a model of military efficiency and economy. Starting from scratch within a day or two of the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the team reporting to President Bush came up with a plan, recruited allies, persuaded reluctant nations bordering on Afghanistan to serve as launching pads, sent in covert action teams, began bombing the Taliban's paltry handful of military assets on Oct. 7, galvanized the Northern Alliance, sweet-talked Pashtun tribal leaders to switch sides, chased the Taliban out of Kabul on Nov. 13 and installed a friendly interim government under Hamid Karzai three days before Christmas. What could be cleaner than that?
But watched day by day from inside the White House, as recorded by Bob Woodward in his remarkable new book, ''Bush at War,'' the campaign was halting and full of alarms, a hastily assembled patchwork of old ideas. Chief among them were heavy leaning on governments that would have preferred to keep out of it, bombing and then more bombing, stack upon stack of $100 bills for tribal leaders and a strategy of let's-you-and-him-fight. These various strands were held together by a confident president who believes his job is to know what he wants, stay one jump ahead of his team and keep pushing until the team, and then the world, fall into step behind him.
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.
Woodward has been writing books in roughly this way for 20 years, and during that time he has rarely been attacked by his subjects for getting things wrong. In the present case Rice and Rumsfeld were both there; either or both could say it never happened, but both have been silent. The lack of protest, combined with Woodward's reputation, inclines me to trust his account as solid until something else comes along that says different with footnotes. Accepting ''Bush at War'' for what it is -- something akin to an unofficial transcript of 100 days of debate over war in Afghanistan, with omissions of unknown significance -- then what does it tell us about the character of President Bush and his government, and what does it tell us about the war they are planning to fight next? It is my sense that the answer in both cases is: quite a lot.
Over the last several months, as the administration talked first of attacking Iraq without further delay, but then with much foot-dragging agreed to consult with the United Nations and finally to give Saddam Hussein a chance to submit to the Security Council's tough new resolution, I sometimes imagined that it was all an elaborate charade following a well-constructed script. Woodward's account of the internal argument over attacking Iraq, a kind of coda to his book, persuades me it wasn't so. Far from being deeply hidden, what these men believed and wanted was so close to the surface that even the newspaper-reading public knew roughly how the argument was unfolding. Rumsfeld wanted somebody to hold his coat so he could start throwing punches, Cheney growled that inspections were a waste of time, Powell was distressed by his colleagues' apparent willingness to toss 50 years of American commitment to collective security out the window, while Bush, listening to the inner voice he has grown increasingly to trust, gradually tipped in the direction of regime change, and once he got there, said so loud and clear.
It worked pretty much the same way following Sept. 11. As the administration prepared to go to war it was the tough talkers who set the tone, and none talked tougher than Cofer Black, who described the C.I.A.'s plan for a no-holds-barred antiterror campaign to Bush only two days after the fall of the World Trade Center. ''When we're through with them,'' he said, ''they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.''
But as the war unfolded a degree of caution and restraint emerges in Woodward's description. What the administration mainly feared was the Q word -- quagmire -- meaning American troops in division strength trapped in an indecisive war. But at the same time they wanted ''boots on the ground'' -- actual Americans carrying guns inside Afghanistan -- lest they be convicted of following the pattern set by President Bill Clinton, frequently derided by members of the Bush team as an ineffectual wimp for responding to earlier Qaeda attacks with a flurry of cruise missiles that blew up empty tents. ''Pounding sand'' was what Rumsfeld called that.
Squaring this circle was not easy. First inside Afghanistan, according to Woodward, was a C.I.A. covert action team run by Gary (no last name), an old hand fluent in Dari and Pashto. The team spotted targets for the Air Force, urged on the Northern Alliance and distributed cash to friendly warlords -- not ''the usual $200,000,'' but twice or even five times as much, in foot-high stacks of $100 bills, 20 stacks to the million. The Army was slower off the mark; weather, unidentified logistical problems, the long struggle to get a Combat Search and Rescue Team center up and running in Uzbekistan, delayed boots on the ground until well along in the war.
Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was focused on ''target sets'' for American bombers, which the Air Force hit and then rehit while advisers with the Northern Alliance kept asking for strikes on the Taliban forces blocking the road to Kabul. At the time, in October and November 2001, there was much speculation in the press that the Air Force was ignoring the Taliban on the northern front as a matter of deep policy -- a way of convincing Pashtun warlords in the south that defeat of the Taliban did not necessarily mean the triumph of Tajiks in the Northern Alliance. Not so, Woodward says. Rumsfeld was simply preoccupied with crossing off items in the target set; when he finally got around to directing the Air Force to open the road to Kabul, things started to unravel in a hurry.
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.
Thomas Powers is the author most recently of ''Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to al-Qaeda.''
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