A D.C.-centric inquiry into Iraq war

A Secret White House History, 2006-2008

By Bob Woodward.

Simon & Schuster. 512 pp. $32.

Reviewed by Ross K. Baker

Bob Woodward, you're no Leo Tolstoy.

And it is not because your four volumes on the Iraq war do not add up to the sheer bulk of

War and Peace

, or because you write plodding prose. Rather, it is because, since you are a journalist and associate editor of the Washington Post, your access to the key players in the Iraq drama is the envy of everyone in your profession, and you should have done better.

Perhaps it is the melancholy subject matter, but there is little breadth in Woodward's latest book,

The War Within

. He devotes little time to drawing the larger meaning of our mission in that country. Woodward's epilogue, where such a panorama might have been located, consists of only 11 pages, most of which are devoted to unremarkable observations about President Bush's mishandling of the war.

Woodward's shortcomings as a writer can be summed up in one word: verisimilitude.

In striving to capture every conversation in what Woodward asserts to be the precise words of the principals involved in war planning, the author inundates us with a tsunami of dialogue so dense and repetitive that it is difficult to cull from the bureaucratic blather what is really important.

I will plead guilty to the reviewer's sin of criticizing a book because it is not the book the reviewer would have written, but

The War Within

is so relentlessly Washington-centered that a reader who relies on Woodward might conclude that the successes achieved recently in Iraq were solely the product of American inspiration and action.

The troop surge that began in 2007 is the pivotal event of this book, and Woodward usefully describes the struggle over the additional troops between Gen. George Casey, then our ground commander in Iraq, and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the one side; and members of the Iraq Study Group and Gen. Jack Keane, a retired but highly influential Army officer, on the other. But little time is devoted to the developments in Anbar Province that resulted in the formation of the Awakening Councils, or to the Sons of Iraq, who switched allegiances from al-Qaeda to the Americans because of their revulsion against the rule of the fundamentalists.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq, typically pressing their advantage in Anbar to the point of being self-defeating, banned cigarette smoking and booze and intimidated men without the requisite amount of facial hair. For secular Sunnis, even former Baathists, this was too much. This reaction, which preceded the troop surge, is barely touched on by Woodward and may contribute to the common misunderstanding that it was the surge, and the surge alone, that began to turn things around in Iraq.

If Woodward's reporting on his conversations with President Bush are as verbatim as he presents them, the president's speech seems to be little more than a collection of vacuous slogans and windy exhortations. It is asking too much of a leader to infuse his everyday conversations with Churchillian prose, but Bush's comments, if accurately rendered by Woodward, display an appalling shallowness that even his worst detractors have hesitated to ascribe to Bush. This is certainly not Woodward's fault as rapporteur, but it is disheartening to those of us who wanted to give Bush the benefit of the doubt for his invertebrate public speaking style and chalk up his shaky public performances to stage fright. Perhaps, over time, presidents just lose the ability to reflect.

A less attractive alternative is that some of them may be incapable of reflection. It has long been observed that this president operates from the gut, but even those whose viscera are the wellsprings of action - think John McCain - are capable of seeing larger meanings in events.

It is not just the president who fares poorly in Woodward's account. Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is depicted as a compliant yes-man. Rumsfeld is obsessed with proving his theory that a compact military force could handle the security problems of a sprawling country with multitudes of people with scores to settle. He also comes off, quite properly, as a major villain of the piece.

Casey, who either bought into Rumsfeld's doctrine of victory on the cheap or concluded that accepting more troops would be interpreted as a failure on his part, is presented as rigid, out of touch, even befuddled, a characterization I have heard more than once from Republican senators.

Not surprisingly, those who cooperated most enthusiastically with Woodward are revealed as the hidden geniuses.

Those of us who lived through the Vietnam War will certainly note the preoccupation with the body count. That term was scrapped because of its bad historic associations and was replaced by the neutral term

metrics

. As eagerly as Lyndon B. Johnson clung to the belief that robust enemy casualty figures were an augury of military success, President Bush was heartened by the large numbers of insurgents reported killed by U.S. forces.

This belief in the indicative power of enemy corpses brings to mind an old soldiers' lament from the Korean War. It went something like this: "One American soldier is the match for 10 North Koreans. Problem is, there are 20 North Koreans."

The motto over the entrance to the National Defense University in Washington is "Let History Arm the Mind." In the conduct of the Iraq war, the minds of many were unilaterally disarmed. For all of its shortcomings,

The War Within

makes that point frequently, if not eloquently.