State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III

Parameters, Spring, 2007 by Jeffrey Record

State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. By Bob Woodward. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. 560 pages. $30.00 ($15.00 paper). Reviewed by Jeffrey Record, Professor of Strategy and International Security, Air War College.

State of Denial is Bob Woodward's third book on the George W. Bush administration's internal national security deliberations post 9/11. Unlike Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), however, State of Denial has been denounced by the White House. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney cooperated with Woodward on the first two books, which more or less favorably portrayed the Bush White House (neither book questioned the administration's credibility or competence), but they refused to be interviewed for the third. Perhaps they suspected what was coming: a scorching condemnation of what the legendary insider journalist portrays as an arrogant, clueless, and dysfunctional leadership mired in a war it neither anticipated nor has come to understand.

State of Denial, which may reflect Woodward's own turning against the Iraq War and desire to cash in on its growing unpopularity, offers no profound new insights on the Bush administration. Observers have for years remarked on the president's intellectual incuriosity and the equation of dissent with disloyalty. Indeed, critics believe that truth refuses--or is not permitted--to speak to power in the Bush White House. According to Woodward, CIA Director George Tenet believed that a "naive" George Bush was making a huge mistake in attacking Iraq but never got around to voicing his misgivings to the president. Nor did Jay Garner feel obligated to alert the president that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer was making "three tragic mistakes" in Iraq that could doom Operation Iraqi Freedom to strategic defeat.

And Woodward is hardly the first critic to paint Dick Cheney as a worst-case fantasist and intelligence cherry picker; Donald Rumsfeld as an arrogant, micromanaging bully; Condoleezza Rice as a weak national security adviser disposed to tell her boss what he wanted to hear; and Colin Powell as a bureaucratically isolated, reluctant warrior who allowed the administration's war-lusting neoconservatives to enlist his prestige on behalf of a war he regarded as unnecessary and potentially disastrous (see Karen DeYoung's superb Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell). State of Denial can also be seen as but the latest in an avalanche of books documenting the botched American performance in Iraq.

State of Denial does contain important new revelations. Just two months before the 9/11 attacks CIA Director George Tenet delivered a stark warning to then National Security Adviser Rice of an impending al Qaeda attack which she more or less ignored. In 2005 Vice President Cheney declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes when in fact the administration knew that insurgent violence was worse than ever and growing. And as the Bush administration's first term drew to a close White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card repeatedly pushed President Bush to fire Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld but was finally thwarted by the Vice President, who believed that it "would only be seen as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war." it also turns out that Henry Kissinger, though detested by the same neoconservatives who provided the intellectual rationale for the Iraq War, has served as an intimate national security adviser to George W. Bush via the mechanism of private dinners with the president every couple of months.

Woodward also reveals that then Marine Corps Commandant James Jones, favored to replace outgoing JCS Chairman Richard Myers, refused to be interviewed for the job because he believed that Rumsfeld had reduced the chairmanship to a sycophantic vehicle of politically corrupted military advice. Indeed, Jones, who subsequently became NATO's supreme commander, tried to talk General Peter Pace out of taking the job. Jones told Pace that Iraq was "a debacle" and that Rumsfeld had "systematically emasculated" the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "You should not be a parrot on the secretary's shoulder." Pace (obviously) was not persuaded.

State of Denial indicts all the Bush administration's national security principals for their various roles in plunging the country into what an increasing number of Americans believe is an unwarranted and messed up war. But none of the principals is more scathingly accused than former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who inhabits the book as a domineering, self-important, abusive, and incompetent war leader--a Republican Robert McNamara. By early 1968 McNamara had become an unacceptable political liability to the White House, and his replacement by Clark Clifford heralded a fundamental change in the Johnson administration's Vietnam War policy. Rumsfeld, however, appears still to enjoy the confidence of President Bush, and it is in any event far from clear that his involuntary departure from the Pentagon would signal a change in the White House's opaque Iraq War policy of "staying the course."