The ongoing domestic scrutiny of America's
run-up to the Iraq war has been refueled with the
Washington Post's top headline publication Saturday
morning of excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book,
Plan of
Attack. The Post,
which employs Woodward as an assistant managing editor,
plans to publish more than 10 pages of additional
excerpts over this week.
While the Iraq war was
unlikely to stay off the news, what with the mounting US
casualties through April, Woodward's publication
redirects attention back to the original war plan and
the motives behind it rather than the present and future
of the war.
The hitherto published excerpts,
subsequent statements by Woodward, and a response to
them by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on
CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, clearly indicate that
Plan of
Attack will be
significant to the US media industry and political class
for its retrospective value.
In line with the
well-sold memoir by US President George W Bush's former
counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, Woodward's book
should prevent the White House from moving forward just
yet in the public discourse on the war. While
confronting the news about the fast-worsening situation
in Iraq, the White House must continue to revisit the
uncomfortable older details and clarify them in the
public forums.
That aside, the overall character
of the Woodward book's potential political significance
is far from straightforward - for many reasons.
Woodward's distinctive status For a start,
Woodward - who wrote an earlier book on Bush's
anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal
with Carl Bernstein in 1972 - is not an ex-insider with
the administration, unlike Clarke and former treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill (whose bureaucratic biography,
also published this year, attacked Bush for neglecting
him and his key suggestions). Thus, Woodward cannot be
convincingly accused of being a disgruntled former
employee of the White House or having a personal grudge
against the president and his staff members. Not having
any known political ambitions, Woodward (unlike Clarke)
also can't be doubted or faulted for publishing his book
in an election year.
While Woodward can be
characterized generally as anti-establishment, his
credibility as a reporter is as yet impeccable - hence
his words will be valued by the average American and
used by politicians as if they were "news".
Accordingly, Bush's presumptive presidential
opponent Senator John Kerry, who stopped short of
exploiting Clarke's account to attack the White House,
has shown no hesitation this time. Based on Woodward's
book, Kerry charged on NBC News' Meet the Press on
Sunday that Bush "misleads his secretary of state about
his own planning for a war".
Possibility of a wider
appeal The published extracts suggest that Woodward's
book is not meant to be, nor is presented as, an expert
critique of either counter-terrorism or the Iraq war;
instead, it is a journalistic rendition of the sequence
of events and the intimate roles played in them by a
large cast of powerful characters.
Because of
those apparently descriptive or representative aims, but
also because of the dramatized structure or format of
the narrative - which includes actual conversations
among the central players, interspersed with compelling
interpretations by Woodward - the book is likely to have
a wider popular readership than has been enjoyed by the
accounts of O'Neill and Clarke. Woodward's insider
status within the journalistic establishment of the
United States would additionally assist in expanding the
outreach of his ideas.
The published extracts
also suggest that Woodward by default pulls down the
lofty edifice of Bush's national strategy - otherwise
draped at once in a secretive, confrontational, and
God-based rhetoric of realpolitik - to the level,
basically, of White House gossip. As such, the book
appears to take some veneer away from the presidency and
to deliver a political sitcom that the average American
can access happily and without feeling awe-struck.
In this sitcom, as Americans will soon learn in
lively detail, their powerful-looking leader-actors
appear as fallible, though calculating, characters
living on a day-to-day basis, acting out their fears and
motives among themselves, and not trusting one another
entirely or always. At least one of those characters,
Vice President Dick Cheney, may come across to some
Americans as pathological - such as in his fratboyish
assurance to the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin
Sultan that "once we start [bombing], Saddam [Hussein]
is toast".
Alongside this, Americans will
discover some curious behind-the-scene episodes - such
as General Tommy Franks' release of expletives upon
being ordered that he must prepare for an attack on Iraq
(while busy with the Afghanistan conflict), or the
sharing of a top-secret map by the Pentagon with Prince
Bandar.
Americans will also learn - afresh - how
"intelligence" was received and "promoted" within the
top corridors of US power; they will learn about
Cheney's steering of intelligence into certain
directions and his role as a "steamrolling force" for
Iraq; they will also come to know that Prince Bandar was
informed of the plan for the Iraq war ahead of Secretary
of State Colin Powell.
Woodward has also duly
let the president explain and defend his penchant for
secrecy in planning for the Iraq war. In his interview
with Woodward, Bush attributed the secrecy to a need for
avoiding "enormous international angst and domestic
speculation". As for the war itself, Bush called it his
"absolute last option".
Mixed political effects
While
Woodward has already succeeded, through the publicity
about the publication of the book, in showing the
fractures within the White House staff - the clear rift,
for example, between Cheney and Powell regarding going
to Iraq - it is difficult to predict the overall
domestic political effect of such disclosures. So long
as these executives continue to reaffirm their
solidarity in public, the public won't be bothered about
those older domestic disputes. In fact, the disputes may
humanize, in a sense attribute, a sense of lively debate
and democracy to the otherwise well guarded and steely
Bush White House.
Meantime, while Woodward has
opened up the White House wider to the public, many of
the internal details he has highlighted actually seem to
rescue Bush from direct blame at the expense of the
war-crazed Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief
George Tenet. In Woodward's account, Bush appears as
someone misled by Tenet's flawed intelligence and
misplaced confidence. At a December 2002 meeting where
Bush questioned the CIA's evidence of weapons of mass
destruction, Tenet told the president, "Don't worry,
it's a slam-dunk case."
Short of the accusation
of secrecy (which is already explained away as a matter
of strategy and stands uncontested by his deputies) and
of a hasty, preconceived decision to remove Saddam from
power in Iraq (not a huge concern yet to the average
American), Bush may well come out looking more blameless
than many might hope from this book.
Given the
fact that Woodward, according to the Washington Post,
got the information for this book "from more than 75 key
people directly involved in the events, including war
cabinet members, the White House staff and officials
serving at various levels of the State and Defense
departments and the Central Intelligence Agency", it is
best to approach the book as a joint dream-work (of
which Woodward was only one willing participant) rather
than as something fiercely independent or critically
objective.
As such, one should perhaps first
categorically reject Woodward's historic Watergate
expose as a model before picking up the current book,
which also happens to be about the White House. In the
present case, the White House has allowed access to
Woodward almost as a matter of a public relations
strategy. For all that, while it may appear on the
surface that Woodward is exposing the Bush White House
with this book, the truth is that the White House has
let Woodward in - presumably in the expectation of some
PR payoff.
The politics of this joint payoff -
for Bob Woodward, the celebrity journalist, and the
White House - is and will be complex for all. So unless
Kerry is very careful, the ongoing focus on Iraq -
despite or because of this book - may actually work to
his disadvantage by preventing him from forcefully
presenting his own administrative agenda and ideological
platform.
The published extracts from the book,
in any case, give no indication that Bush's image has
suffered at the hands of Woodward. It should thus come
as no surprise that the president's campaign website has
already listed the book as "suggested reading", and
provided a direct link to order a copy from Amazon.com.
Piyush Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, and Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), is an
independent observer of world affairs, the environment,
science and technology policy, and literature.
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