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REVIEWS
BOOKS

Photo: Bush jokes with Blair in February 2001. During talks on Iraq, Bush said he did not want to see Blair's government go down

He also instructed 75 members of his administration to make themselves similarly available. Since then, three other volumes of importance have appeared -- Ron Suskind’s “The Price of Loyalty,” drawn from dismissed Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s recollections; former White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke’s “Against All Enemies,” which alleges the administration was insufficiently attentive to al-Qaida; and James Mann’s “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet,” which documents the fundamental influence of the neoconservatives. All three have been vigorously attacked by the White House and its allies. However, Woodward’s narrative of the march to war uses administration sources to corroborate the essential thesis of all three: that the Bush team arrived with an obsessive fixation on Saddam, that it initially discounted the threat from al- Qaida and that it was excessively in thrall to the neoconservatives’ vision of a muscular new Wilsonianism that would spread democracy at the point of a gun. Two vignettes Woodward reports from the pre-inauguration period are particularly telling. In early January 2001, he writes, Vice President-elect Cheney “passed a message to the outgoing secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, a moderate Republican who served in the Democratic Clinton Administration. ” „We really need to get the president-elect briefed up on some things,’ Cheney said, adding that he wanted a serious „discussion about Iraq and different options.’ The president-elect should not be given the routine, canned round-the-world tour normally given incoming presidents. Topic A should be Iraq.“ A few days later, Bush, Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were secretly briefed by CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy for operations, James L. Pavitt. They told the incoming president and his two closest security advisers that ”there were three major threats to American national security.

Photo: Author, Bob Woodward.

One was Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network, which operated out of a sanctuary in Afghanistan.“ The other threats, Tenet and Pavitt, said, were the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, though they conspicuously failed to mention Iraq in that context, and the military rise of China, ”but that problem was five to 15 or more years away.“ The atrocities of Sept. 11 would follow and within days Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were pushing for anything that would link Saddam to the attack. When Tenet subsequently briefed the president on the CIA’s by-then-firm opinion that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction, Bush -- who invariably displays a particular shrewdness toward political questions -- called the presentation ”not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.“ Tenet proclaimed the case, ”a slam dunk.“ No one seems to have asked why such an open-and-shut case hadn’t been made in that pre-inaugural briefing? Silence as it turns out, plays a pivotal role in the Bush administration’s deliberations. The president never asked Powell or any other adviser he knew harbored reservations about renewed military action in Iraq whether they thought it was a good idea to go to war. Powell, who believed Cheney has a ”fever“ when it came to Saddam and thought of the neoconservatives’ proposals were plainly ”lunatic,“ never offered his President the opinion for which he was not asked. Those who come to ”Plan of Attack“ hoping to find the moment when the president of the United States went around the table and asked his cabinet and advisers should we go to war, will not find it. It did not occur and none of them demanded it. Instead, a highly selective search for advice and a series of maneuvers that made conflict inevitable produced an irresistible slide into conflict. Whether this is the ethic of bureaucracy or steely statesmanship is one of the conclusions on which readers will differ. The same polls that show terrorism and Iraq rising to the top of prospective voters’ concerns also show that President Bush’s approval rating have easily weathered the storms of the past month -- further disintegration of the military situation in Iraq and rising American casualties, the hearings of the 9/11 panel, the disclosures in Clarke’s and Woodward’s books. It seems likely that readers will take from Woodward’s splendid narrative pretty much what they brought to it, either a belief that the war in Iraq could not be avoided or a conviction that it is a tragic national mistake. Point in fact: This week, the official Web sites of both Sen. John Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee and the campaign to re-elect Bush/Cheney included ”Plan of Attack“ on their lists of recommended reading. -Tim Rutten.

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