Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Woodward hits hard in Volume III of his GWOT history, 11 Oct 2006
State of Denial, the third book in famed journalist Bob Woodward's examination of the Bush administration's approach to war, is sure to be one of the most controversial. State of Denial looks at the policy decisions and inner maneuverings of the administration as America got deeper and deeper into the quagmire that is the Iraq War. As one can see by the reviews already up on Amazon, emotions are running high since Woodward has taken a decidedly harsh view towards the administration. Ironically for Woodward, he was taken to task for being an administration cheerleader in the first two volumes. What State of Denial shows us is that no matter your personal politics, it's important to understand why decisions were made, who were making them, and what people inside the government are saying about the conduct of the war to date. Woodward accomplished that quite well here, thanks to interviews with many of the key players in the process (though notably not with the President and Vice-President.)
One of the main focuses of the book is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has been under heavy criticism for his heavy-handed management of the war and his failures to make tactical and strategic adjustments. Rumsfeld is in charge of a Pentagon intent on spending billions on high tech and unnecessary weapon systems like the F-22, the DDG-1000 destroyer, and the Army FCS while making little effort on raising the overall troop strength of the Army and Marine Corps. Even with the chorus of military and politicians calling for Rumsfeld's firing, it still comes as a surprise that Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff and top advisor was pushing for Rumsfeld's ouster as early as 2004. Woodward also claims Card enlisted First Lady Laura Bush in the effort, a story that seems somewhat apocryphal. In several in-depth interviews with Woodward, Rumsfeld comes across as honest, arrogant, and firmly believing in his own success despite the torrent of criticism he receives from the military and NSC staffers interviewed for the book.
Some of the newer nuggets of information offered in the book are fascinating. Woodward reveals that then National Security Advisor Condi Rice was briefed in July 2001 by CIA Director George Tenet and CIA counter-terror expert Cofer Black on the increasing likelihood of an attack on US interests. Woodward discusses how Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, was a key player in advising President Bush before and after 9/11. Another of the book's most interesting revelations is that Henry Kissinger regularly advises President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. Considering Kissinger's status as the architect of a failed Vietnam policy, this tidbit only reinforces Woodward's assertion that the administration refuses to do anything other than "stay the course." Throughout the book the administration is portrayed as as blind to the reality of the Iraq War as it was eager to paint a rosy public picture, ignoring or classifying facts that didn't fit its view of success and labeling those who disagreed as negative and not "team players."
As with many other Woodward books, the book reads quickly and quite cleanly. The level of detail is impressive, and State of Denial expands upon the material covered by James Risen and Thomas Ricks. The material on Bremer and his disasterous tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority was adroitly addressed in detail in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and Woodward doesn't add anything new in that regard. One wonders how much of the material given by Woodward's sources is slanted to better represent their role in history's judgemental eye and how much is actual truth. Woodward lays out the material in its entirety from the many sources, and lets the reader decide which is revisionist and which is reality. Partisans on both side will either love or hate this book regardless of its content, but as a whole this book is fair and balanced. Woodward is no partisan attack dog, he is a journalist committed to telling a story fairly and accurately without regard to what his critics may think. Highly Recommended.
A.G. Corwin
St. Louis, MO
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exhausting indictment of Bush's failure in Iraq, 8 Feb 2007
There is a sense in reading this long book that the overall import of the Bush administration's efforts in Iraq are lost in the thicket of the words, lost among the turf wars and the personality clashes, among the intense concentrations on each individual action or speech, each personnel change and the myriad events on the ground. But Woodward's title makes it clear what has happened: the Bush administration through flawed (or lack of) foresight, ignorance and confused execution perpetuated upon the United States and the world one of the worse foreign policy blunders ever by an American president and then wrapped itself in a cocoon of denial.
The text runs 491 pages. It could be shorter. Woodward worked mostly on "background," that is, with the understanding that the information could be used but the source would not be identified by name. President Bush, who had been interviewed four times for Woodward's previous books, did not allow an interview for this book. Woodward's last interview with Bush was in 2003. Cheney also declined to be interviewed. Other officials, mostly notably Rumsfeld spoke on record. Woodward recorded the interviews which accounts for the numerous quotes in the text.
Rumsfeld is the chief villain, omnipresent, cajoling, bullying, denying, obscuring, getting his way, micromanaging, at it 14 hours a day, seven days a week, the ultimate ivory tower bureaucratic drunk with his power and lost in the trees and the weeds.
Condi Rice is off to the side, behind Bush listening, listening, enigmatic, reminding me somehow of Shakespeare's Iago.
Bush is the action guy, the decider, as he likes to think of himself. He glad hands people and needles them, asks about their accent or where they went to school, dreams up nicknames, disparages, rides roughshod and gets people to justify his agenda. And denies, denies, denies, because to Bush to admit error is to give comfort to your enemies.
In the background is Dick Cheney, the puppeteer masterminding the whole disaster. He occasionally comes forward to further some bold-faced lie.
The disconnect between reality and the neocon dream is stunning. All these self-important types in the DOD and the Bush White House running around deciding the fate of millions of people and spending hundreds of billions of dollars appeared as children playing some kind of game unsupervised by adults. Only Powell in the state department seemed to have any sense of history or moral responsibility, and sadly he became just a tool in the process because he could not help but be the good soldier and obey the commander in chief. Woodward quotes Michigan Senator Carl Levin as saying "Powell had the potential to change the course here...He's the only one who had the potential to." Levin apparently believed that the war might have been avoided had Powell threatened to resign in protest. He was a powerful figure at that time and now is ultimately a tragic character.
Also tragic is the behind the scenes part played by Henry Kissinger who occasionally came to the White House to give advice to Bush 43. For inexplicable reasons the president admired him even though Kissinger's policies failed in Vietnam and even though several decades later he still refuses to accept blame for that failure. To him it was a matter of not getting enough support from the American public, from the press and from Congress. He believes if we had maintained our resolve we would have "won" in Vietnam.
"Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy" (p. 408) is Kissinger's position on Iraq, which has become Bush's position. But the only realistic way to win a war against an insurgency (other than through killing most or all of them) is to win the hearts and minds of the people. We haven't done that. It's too vast a project to even contemplate, which is why most authorities are opposed to "nation building." It would take too long and require the kind of soft force that we have yet to develop: peace corps types, translators, educators, media and advertising people, engineers and technicians, economists, bankers, agriculturalists, even sociologists, and the recruitment of a sizeable percentage of the population. It would require a security force several times the size of the military that we presently have in Iraq to protect the soft force. It require a virtual army of nation-building people versed in nation-building skills. You don't use infantrymen to build nations.
By the time we get to 2005 (the book went to press around July 2006) Condi Rice, now Secretary of State, is presenting a condition for success in Iraq. It consists of "breaking and neutralizing the insurgency, keeping Iraq from becoming a significant base for terrorism, demonstrating some democratic process, and turning the corner fiscally and economically." (p. 417) Ironically, all of these conditions (with the exception of the vague "demonstrating some democratic process") prevailed in Iraq before we invaded!
Woodward makes it clear that Bush is responsible for the war. He wasn't brainwashed by Wolfowitz or Cheney. He had his own reasons to invade: to go one up on his father; to run in 2004 as a wartime president (something his father failed to do and was not reelected); to show his macho; to let the generals play with and test their hi-tech toys; to exhaust the treasury; to keep the oil flowing...etc. Bush is the frat boy at sixty. Clever, shrewd, shallow and untouched by the harm that he does to others.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Woodward's third Iraq volume explains the wayward war, 19 Dec 2006
This exceptional book reveals the Bush Administration's war in Iraq through the exacting eyes of noted journalist Bob Woodward. The third volume in his "Bush at War" series, it unfolds as a vivid history, a detailed, a step-by-step progression of events, personalities and motives. Woodward lets the insiders and their stories speak for themselves as he describes how both powerful and everyday people succumb to large public mistakes, and how those shape history. He has written this book as a series of short vignettes - and as the scenes unfold, so do the personalities and their individual quirks. Readers see why some plans succeeded and others failed. Those who seek sinister people with ulterior motives will be disappointed. The story did not develop that way. These seem to be well-meaning people who lost touch and failed. We consider this essential reading for anyone who seriously wants to understand the Iraq war and the people fighting it.
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