Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp576
This is a story of total government malfunction. Since the government is the most powerful on earth, it is terrifying. The first two volumes of veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s post-9/11 trilogy, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, recounted how America came to invade Iraq, basically because its leaders wanted to. The final volume takes us through the post-invasion occupation. For those deluded into accepting American (and British) propaganda on this subject, it makes miserable reading.
As its title indicates, Woodward’s book is about lies. It is about the capacity of clever people caught up in the hysteria of war to believe what they want to believe and reject bad news. The mistakes made in Baghdad and Washington since 2003 are familiar from an already groaning shelf of books, notably Thomas Ricks’s recent Fiasco. While the assumption of absolute American potency made the invasion possible, the same assumption made the occupation disastrous. Even as America warned itself time and again not to attempt a coercive empire in the Middle East, it found itself trying just that.
In Woodward’s Plan of Attack we read of the intelligence, or lack of it, behind the “slam-dunk evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Now we read of Colonel Rotkoff writing madcap haikus as he and his men search the 946 locations on the WMD Master Site List and find not a single weapon, just oil dumps, or mounds in the sand. When Rotkoff and his colleagues fail, the hawkish David Kay is sent out with the helpful instruction, “Don’t f*** up.” When he fails, the president starts talking about finding “weapons of mass destruction related program activities”.
A popular thesis of the pro-war lobby is that the invasion was fine but the occupation was wrecked by blunders. Yet the occupation was the child of the invasion. The Iraqis’response was the natural response of a country attacked and occupied. When Jay Garner, the first proconsul sent to Baghdad, faced catastrophe, he said so, and was replaced by Paul Bremer. When Bremer faced catastrophe, he was replaced by John Negroponte, who in turn was replaced by Zalmay Khalilzad. When Garner returned to Washington in June 2003, he told Donald Rumsfeld that they had made “three tragic decisions, three big mistakes”: de-Ba’athification, disbanding the Iraqi army and dumping the initial Iraqi leadership group in favour of direct rule. Yet when Garner is summoned to give this report to Bush, he tells heart-warming stories of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion. Like most people in this book, he is a good soldier who will not tell truth to power. Why should he incur his commander-in-chief’s displeasure at his moment of retirement?
Most books on the war recount battlefield errors, provincial chaos and man’s inhumanity to man. Woodward’s view is top down. He examines the reactions and relations of those in high office, showing them shouting, hugging, scheming, doubting, bullying, telling lies. When their judgment should be clear it is clouded by loyalty and fear. The lines of command are overloaded with people. Each decision is pushed upwards. Nobody takes blame and everyone is on record for their future careers.
Chief villain is Rumsfeld, with his friend Dick Cheney as eminence noir. Bush’s failure to sack him in 2004 is explicable only because of Cheney’s influence. Rumsfeld is unable to manage people or take bad news, a control freak who tries to rule Iraq 24 hours a day from his desk at the Pentagon. A decision to pay salaries to a group of soldiers or to switch funds from sewers to electricity has to go through his bureaucracy. As a result, there is daily conflict, not just within Washington but between American officials besieged in the Green Zone and those outside it in the field. One moment the policy is “clear and hold”, another it is “search and destroy”. A village is targeted for hearts and minds and then unaccountably bombed. At the centre of the web is Rumsfeld, “indecisive, untrusting, cautious, often abusive”.
Rumsfeld once had a strategy of going into Iraq “lite”, smashing things up and leaving the mess to find a new equilibrium. As early as September 2003, the American army was desperate to transfer sovereignty and get out, since “ending the occupation would enhance the security situation because the Iraqis don’t like occupation”. Yet this plausible approach never penetrated what had become a rolling nation-building machine. (At one point, Bremer had to buy Iraq’s wheat crop to prevent agriculture collapsing.) Rumsfeld could not deliver even on his own policies, yet he would not accept the consequence and send out more troops.
Bush, whose “vision thing” made him almost the hero of Woodward’s earlier books, appears fumbling and intellectually incurious, unable to see through the sycophantic rubbish being served up to him. His instructions to subordinates are limited to such remarks as, “Kick ass, Jerry.” The logic of war chokes the conduits of debate. Eventually, Bush and his colleagues behave like all generals losing a war. They resort to body-counting and grabbing snippets of good news. When people start saying “victory is the only option”, they are already conceding defeat.
What is mesmerising about Woodward’s book is the readiness of the participants to talk to him, including at one point even Bush and Rumsfeld. It is as if they were making their last will and testament as the engine of history races towards them. This is a strength but also a weakness. Woodward’s access is compelling, but he does little more than hold a microphone to his sources. The book is composed of jottings in bite-sized sections, rendering the 500 pages monotonous to the point of unreadability. We must also take on trust extended passages in direct quotes that the author cannot have heard and for which there cannot be available recordings. Can Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Bremer or Paul Wolfowitz — assuming they are the sources — really remember pages of verbatim conversation with the president? And when so many quotes are derogatory, Woodward’s sources must have some axes to grind.
The book is pure reportage, devoid of analysis let alone conclusion. We learn everyone’s height but not their motives, and are left to draw our own conclusions. One must be that America, as Niall Ferguson has written, lacks the means and the will for empire. It can project power overseas, albeit with vast destruction, but it cannot rule. Eventually, the public tires of the struggle. Washington is chronically handicapped by lacking a civil-service hierarchy independent of politicians and capable of giving impartial advice. The story does not end. It peters out with more bad news from the front. One official sums up Bush’s Iraq policy in 2006 as numb inertia: “We’ve got to have more men fall, to honour the memory of those who have fallen already.”
Any reader inclined to think smugly that Britain would have done things differently should realise that London signed up to every decision recounted in this book. And while many American participants were ready to tell Woodward their views, in part to help bring this tragedy to an end, the Blair government is frozen in omerta. As for the pretence that Britain was an equal partner in this venture, the only references to Blair are to how much, or how little, he should be told. He was not just Bush’s poodle, but one with neither bite nor bark. This is not just America’s disgrace.
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