Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Bush Administration, boldly subtitled A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has attracted conservative attention, because, between the lines of the author’s BDS-inspired diatribe, one can find evidence of George W. Bush’s good judgment, courage, imagination and ability to overcome formidable obstacles in the pursuit of America’s national interest. In the words of the Wall Street Journal,
The success of the surge in pacifying Iraq has been so swift and decisive that it’s easy to forget how difficult it was to find the right general, choose the right strategy, and muster the political will to implement it. It is also easy to forget how many obstacles the State and Pentagon bureaucracies threw in Mr. Bush’s way, and how much of their bad advice he had to ignore, especially now that their reputations are also benefiting from Iraq’s dramatic turn for the better.
Then again, American history offers plenty of examples of wartime Presidents who faced similar challenges: Ulysses Grant became Lincoln’s general-in-chief in 1864, barely a year before the surrender at Appomattox. What matters most is that the President had the fortitude to insist on winning. That’s a test President Bush passed – something history, if not Bob Woodward, will recognize.
Peter Wehner offers a similar perspective, while Rich Lowry excoriates the obstinate resistance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (as reported by Woodward) to the President’s strategy.
The idea of turning a Woodward screed into a source of pro-Bush commentary is delightful, but I must demur. The War Within, like its predecessors, employs a modus operandi that renders it inherently unreliable. As history, it doesn’t qualify as even a zeroth draft.
By his own account, Mr. Woodward’s narrative is based on 150 interviews and an unspecified number of internal Administration documents. I’ve no reason to doubt that he talked to that many people, read a great many memoranda and gathered excellent raw material for a work of history. Unfortunately, those materials are inaccessible to everyone else. There is no way to check the tale that has been extracted from them. Participants in events undoubtedly disagreed about what happened. How did the author weigh their relative credibility? Did he examine their statements for inconsistencies? Has he allowed adequately for their self-interest and bias? Did he make sure to place testimony in its proper context? Did he omit crucial facts or elevate trivia to central importance? There is no way that the reader can know.
It’s commonplace for historians using the same body of evidence to reach strikingly different conclusions, even where they are dealing with a past that no longer excites fervent passions. The addition of ideological animus naturally widens the gulf. It is all but certain that Mr. Woodward’s timbers could be used to construct numerous widely varying buildings. His particular structure could be close to the truth. It could also be a fun house distortion. It certainly cannot be used uncritically – yet critical use requires being able to look at the evidence that the soi disant historian has kept out of sight.
One’s confidence in The War Within’s analysis is seriously undermined by its evident determination to place President Bush in the worst possible light: first, by asserting that the “process” by which he decided to commit more troops to Iraq and alter the way in which they were used was faulty (that is, insufficiently deferential to “expert” opinion that turned out to be wrong); second, by claiming that the “surge” played no important role in shaping the present state of affairs, that things would have worked out about the same if the President had followed the (alleged) advice of the Joint Chiefs and retreated from the Iraqi theater. As Peter Wehner summarizes,
On the matter of the surge, Woodward downplays its importance. He argues that the enormous drop in violence in Iraq is owed mainly to other factors (the Sunni uprising against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the ceasefire with Moktada al-Sadr), and even to luck (a top-secret operation targeting terrorist leaders came online, he claims, at the same time the surge was being executed).
It seems obvious to me, as it does to Mr. Wehner, “that the surge reinforced every good thing that has happened in Iraq. All the other actors – the Sunnis in Anbar, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sadr and his minions, the government in Baghdad, Iraq’s neighbors – had to factor the staying power and reinforcement of the U.S.-led coalition into their calculations. It enabled everything else to take place.”
There is, however, a more fundamental point to which Mr. Woodward’s anti-Bush passion blinds him. If the situation in Iraq in early 2007 was truly such that the Anbar Awakening was bound to succeed and al-Sadr’s “Mahdi Army” to stand down, then it was not at all desperate. By Mr. Woodward’s lights, the anti-mufsidun forces were in such a strong position that all they needed from the U.S. was a little help with tracking down and executing high-level terrorists. If that was so, doesn’t it vindicate the Administration’s pre-surge strategy, which the same Bob Woodward derided in his earlier volume, State of Denial?
It’s not hard to infer that this book was begun in confidence that the surge would fail. The plot was preordained: Stubborn, out-of-touch President ignores the wise advice of his generals. They struggle manfully to rescue him from himself but, sad to say, are outmaneuvered.
Reality, though, failed to conform to the narrative, sending Mr. Woodward into his own “state of denial”. He has obviously tried to adhere to his original thesis to the maximum possible extent. Perhaps he is personally satisfied with the resulting work product. There is no reason why anyone else should take it seriously as a guide to what really occurred.
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