Woodward, Revised

Bob Woodward is late to the party. With his new book, State of Denial, he catches up with recent history--big time. As part of the PR blitz for the third of his Bush-at-war chronicles, Woodward appeared on 60 Minutes and summed up the book thus: "It is the oldest story in the coverage of government: the failure to tell the truth." But other journalists were on to that story for years while Woodward was producing books that shied away from such a confrontational conclusion, although his earlier accounts did include negative information about the President and his aides. (Interest declared: The book I wrote with Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, has been competing for attention during the Woodward tsunami.)

Woodward has slammed his Bigfoot brand name on a notion that's not new: George W. Bush has not been honest with the public. Woodward's last book, Plan of Attack--chock-full of fly-on-the-wall reporting--missed this story as Woodward zeroed in on the palace infighting and neglected the Administration's use of flimsy and fraudulent intelligence to rally support for the Iraq invasion. (Before the war, Woodward declared on CNN that "the intelligence shows...there are massive amounts" of WMDs "hidden, buried, unaccounted for" in Iraq.) This time around, he hurls one tale after another at the reader to make the grand point that Bush and his aides have pushed happy-talk about Iraq in public when the real skinny--the intelligence reports, the military assessments--was grounds for despair.

The core narrative is simple: Donald Rumsfeld is a jerk and has ruined the Iraq War. He is the villain of the piece: distrustful, arrogant, indecisive, possessed of a short attention span and micro-managing--make that micro-mismanaging--everything. He wants the power; he shirks the responsibility. He (with help) screwed up the postinvasion planning and ignored warnings from subordinates that he was doing so. He wouldn't return National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's phone calls. He refused to recognize that there were not enough troops in Iraq. Even Paul Wolfowitz, his number two at the Pentagon, got into the act. Woodward notes that Wolfowitz could not compel Rumsfeld to focus on key issues like training Iraqi security forces.

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