BOB WOODWARD'S "State of Denial" is the third volume in what aspires to be an inside history of George W. Bush's wartime presidency.
Less wishfully hagiographic than "Bush at War," less credulously detached than "Plan of Attack," this book's analysis essentially mirrors the shift in opinion on the administration's conduct of the war that has occurred in the foreign policy establishment's broad middle ground, where "reasonable" Republicans and Democrats still mingle in amiable, man-of-the-world solidarity. Still, "State of Denial" is a dogged piece of reporting -- rich in anecdote, telling detail, fascinating snippets of conversation and troubling stories heretofore untold.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday October 03, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 71 words Type of Material: Correction
'State of Denial': A review of Bob Woodward's book "State of Denial" in Monday's Calendar section incorrectly described J. Cofer Black's job as the State Department's counterterrorism chief when he and former CIA Director George Tenet were said to have met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in July 2001. At the time, Black was director of the CIA's counterterrorism center; he became the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator in December 2002.
This is the darker Woodward -- disquieting scene follows chilling bit of dialogue succeeded by secret memo. The administration he now portrays is a grimly feckless assemblage of dysfunction and division, disillusion and self-delusion. Yet for all the sensational revelations -- and there are several -- the overwhelming impression left at this very long book's rather wan end is that much labor has gone into establishing that, when it comes to the Bush White House and its war in Iraq, things are pretty much what they seem.
You don't really need a classified briefing to recognize a military and political quagmire. You don't require an unnamed source to tell you that something is wrong when the number of Americans killed exceeds 2,700 and the acknowledged death toll among Iraqi civilians climbs toward 60,000 -- and there's no end in sight.
In an interview Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Woodward went to the substantive heart of his appraisal: The president and his surrogates have consistently misled the American people and Congress about what's going on in Iraq, insisting that the situation is improving, while the insurgency continues to strengthen and violence escalates. Woodward said that the insurgents now attack U.S. forces 900 times a week, roughly once every 15 minutes. Intelligence experts, he said, believe that "next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying] 'Oh, no, things are going to get better.' " This is despite the fact, as the author writes in his book, that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dispatched trusted aide Philip Zelikow to Iraq in February 2005, and he reported in a secret memo that the country already was "a failed state." Similarly, according to Woodward, generals on the ground were telling Washington that the conflict was "militarily unwinnable." \o7
