Attacking The Plan
Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George Magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.
Bob Woodward’s new book, Plan of Attack, has gotten so much attention that it’s hard to read the book with an unjaundiced eye. The marketing of Plan of Attack, like that of most non-fiction books these days, depends on the promotion of media-friendly scooplets: Colin Powell invoked the Pottery Barn rule ("you break it, you own it") when warning President Bush about war in Iraq. Bush may have cut a secret deal with the Saudis on oil prices. The CIA had a team of spies in Iraq called "ROCKSTARS."
It’s not that these naughty bits are insignificant. Most reporters who uncovered them would be kicking up their heels. But Woodward’s project in Plan of Attack is to show "how and why President George W. Bush, his war council and allies decided to launch a preemptive war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein." Woodward does a solid job on the "how" part. But the more important question is why"why, in the days and weeks after 9/11, did the Bush administration coalesce around the idea of invading Iraq? And on this question, Plan of Attack is a failure.
The problem is Woodward’s strengths and weaknesses as a reporter. He’s terrific at ferreting out documents, particularly those detailing the war planning. Military history buffs will find much to obsess over in Plan of Attack.
And, of course, Woodward has remarkable access to the players involved. President Bush cooperated with him and sent the message to others in his administration that he wanted them to do the same. (With one notable exception, which we’ll come to.) Plan of Attack is a better book than its predecessor, Bush At War, because Woodward actually gets people to speak on the record. It feels more credible than Bush At War, which, depending on your perspective, was either a rousing account of a heroic president, patriotic pablum or a reporter’s cynical attempt to cash in on wartime jingoism while sucking up to a president so as to ensure further cooperation. Or maybe all three.
So Woodward excels at finding things out. Where he’s less good is in thinking about what he unearths. He’s a rational man. In his work ethic, he’s even a little robotic. But the decision to go to war was completely irrational, and it’s beyond Woodward’s powers of comprehension. He can’t explain why the White House was determined to link Iraq to 9/11 when no such links existed; why every piece of intelligence, no matter how flimsy, was weighted to serve as evidence for war; why the administration believed that attacking Iraq was part of the "war against terrorism," while more clearheaded, experienced analysts, such as Richard Clarke, convincingly argued that attacking Iraq would play right into Osama bin Laden’s hands.
Answering these questions requires interdisciplinary skills that Woodward lacks: historiography, to examine how the past experiences of the players shaped their world views; psychology, to understand how their personalities shaped their lust for war; sociology and anthropology, to look at, for example, the role of gender in the formation of White House attitudes toward war.
And all of these tools need to be directed at one man who cooperated with Woodward either very little or not at all: Dick Cheney. Woodward knows that Cheney was pushing for war against Iraq since before 9/11. He just can’t explain why. Explaining Cheney"and, in particular, his influence over the president"might just answer all the unknowns about the United States’ ill-conceived war in Iraq.
Which is why Dick Cheney’s ongoing silence is so maddening. The vice president has a lot to answer for. And it's not Bob Woodward who should be putting the questions to him, but all of America.
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Published: Apr 22 2004
