Bob Woodward To Take Fourth Stab At Getting It Right On Iraq

Washington Post associate editor and famed Watergate investigative journalist Bob Woodward has returned to his recent stomping grounds -- the Bush White House -- for another "deep inside" look at the inner machinery that has driven the nation to war. The result, apparently, is the upcoming The War Within. It's Woodward's fourth such excursion, the previous three yielding Bush At War, Plan Of Attack, and State Of Denial, and, as usual, the Bush administration is happily looking forward to its release.

You can see the contrasting expectations for the book playing out in a single article in The Politico, today. The conventional wisdom is summed up with this sentence: "The book's revelations are likely to propel a re-examination of the Iraq war into the headlines just as the fall presidential campaign is taking off."

Like before, Woodward has again enjoyed "remarkable cooperation" from the White House at "all levels," and "top officials" participated in the effort. The Politico sells "two mornings" of interviews with the President as a major feature of the book, indicative of a sorry state of affairs in which the granting of an interview from the nation's most important public servant is seen as an act of extraordinary generosity and wonderment.

On that score, Woodward can rightly claim to have been greatly fortunate. But I guess none dare ask why it is that after four trips inside the White House, and all the touting -- unparalleled access! -- that has underpinned the sales strategy of each book in this Iraq War tetralogy, we are only now arriving at the one that might "propel a re-examination."

Back in November 2007, Woodward offered up a bit of a confession before a "War And The Fourth Estate" panel discussion, saying that he "was not nearly aggressive enough" during the period before the Iraq War began. Still, he strangely suggested that Bush's "driver" was "a duty to free people." Woodward said these words while the President was in the midst of running offshore prisons and passively sitting on his hands while our partner in the War On Terror, Pervez Musharraf, was suspending the rule of law in Pakistan.

It's a fitting example of the gap between activity and achievement that has persisted in Woodward's work on the Bush White House. The accounts are filled with scintillating details, but there's an overall refusal or inability to connect the dots. Joan Didion perhaps captured Woodward's latter day oeuvre the best by highlighting the intellectual "passivity" that emerges in the crush of quotidian detail, yielding work "in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent" amid "an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."

Naturally, White House officials aren't exactly concerned about what Woodward may write about them, confidently predicting that The War Within will burnish Bush's legacy:

White House officials say they are optimistic that the book, which the publisher says "declassifies the secrets of America's political and military involvement in Iraq," will reflect more favorably on Bush than Woodward's previous volume, "State of Denial," which came out in September 2006.

The president's surge strategy for Iraq, albeit late, has slowed the violence on the ground, and Bush aides believe the book will reflect that.

This is par for the course. The last time a Woodward tome was released amid the furtive speculation that it might "propel a re-examination" of the President in an election year, it was 2004, the book was Plan Of Attack, and the Bush/Cheney Re-Elect website gave it "a greater prominence than Ten Minutes From Normal, written by the administration's own in-house propagandist, Karen Hughes." Since the McCain campaign has made it a point to approach the Iraq War as good policy while simultaneously pretending to break with the current White House on the war's execution, no one should be surprised when the McCain website pimps Woodward's book in similar fashion.

Comments

[keepemhonest]

Anyone following Woodward since Watergate knows, without a doubt, he is in the pocket of right-wing zealots like Bush/Cheney, ROVE/McCain. DUH!!!

Woodward sold his journalistic ethics to the demons LONG AGO!

[fourex]

Only four. Tom Friedman has adjusted both his past and present rhetoric nearly one hundred times. The bottom line for both is that the current conditions are what they predicted, and they can find the quote.

[realpolitic]

Woodward sold out a long time ago. Only a naive journalist could be fooled by a stumblebum like Bush. This paragraph by the author so well defines the Woodward books...

"It's a fitting example of the gap between activity and achievement that has persisted in Woodward's work on the Bush White House. The accounts are filled with scintillating details, but there's an overall refusal or inability to connect the dots. Joan Didion perhaps captured Woodward's latter day oeuvre the best by highlighting the intellectual "passivity" that emerges in the crush of quotidian detail, yielding work "in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent" amid "an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured." "

Woodward details many conversations that took place in the White House and they add up to nothing.

[BobsNotWorking]

John Dean is the author to read. Both about Watergate and about the Bush administration.

[realpolitic]

Very true, his books are excellent! They combine considerable experience, a lawyer's understanding of policy detail, and a realistic fear of what the right is becoming in this country.

[eduvert]

Yeah, but I'm not buying it. Nor the book either.

[Mercedes]

I barely remember the Nixon years (I was born in 1966) but I do remember hearing many times that Bob Woodward was a good journalist who went after the TRUTH, even though it meant that Nixon had to resign under scandal.

It appears he has now sold his soul to the Neo-Con American Empire.

There are so few willing to take on the Bush administration and tell the TRUTH, and I had hoped that Woodward would be a fair and HONEST journalist. Unless this book is Honest and he tells the TRUTH, he is just another shill of the Neo-Cons, who's already written 3 very pro-Bush books. If this is the same pro-Bush crappola, then you'll be wasting your time reading it. Very disappointing...

[BushBites]

Bob Woodward: Stenographer to the powerful.

[luckyt]

Woodward is an opportunistic mediocre journalistic quack trying to make a fast buck before Bush leaves office. Everything that one wants to know about Bush has already been written by far better writers.

[totalliberal]

Surge, surge. The only thing that improved anything in Iraq was the "surge" of my money into the pockets of Sunni warlords. How could an increase of 30,000 troops change anything in a country of 22 million people. Hell that's less than the number of NYC police officers on duty.
When the American money dries up the problem will return. But by then the Republicans hope to be elected again. They only think a few months ahead, don't ya know?

[BBackSoon]

No they think decades ahead. The current plans were laid during the Nixon years they just had to wait for everything to align. The war is only fought so there can be a war. No other reason. The war gives them the right to steal the oil, and to take away our civil liberties and???

The war plans only have to work in 6 month increments, you know, ‘In 6 months we will know more.’ And here we are years down the road in 6 month increments. They are certainly not morons; it is more like evil geniuses.

[totalliberal]

Correction. I should have said they only "have" to think a few months ahead to bamboozle the notoriously short-sighted American public. Especially around election time.