Any More Questions? The President Wants His Lunch . . .

Bob Woodward has introduced his fourth book on the presidency of George W. Bush entitled “The War Within,” making clear at the outset that Bush is a so-called “wartime president.” The book reveals that despite its title, Bush didn’t especially concern himself with the war, certainly not intensively nor with much attention to detail, but he did like the title. Wartime President. It’s intimidating. Who would dare oppose a commander-in-chief who was fighting a war? Plus, it lends such a book a needed air of excitement. Well, at least the dust jacket does.

That’s the basic contradiction in Woodward’s approach: although the eye witness accounts and the facts produce one position which – were it not so bloody – would be more at home in a Marx Brothers film, Woodward, as chronicler of the White House, maintains a proper decorum. In this way, he becomes a sort of American Rolf Seelmann-Eggebert (Trans. Note: a noted German journalist who specializes in reporting on nobility) who unfortunately isn’t reporting about the quirks of King Harald of Norway, but about the leader of the free world, another title that Bush adores but one that also contains an evil contradiction.

There’s no real “front” at all

The dust jacket blurb asserts that Bush has to fight on two fronts; the first is the situation in Iraq, which up to the end of 2006 could be described as hellish and after that time, perhaps, just purgatory-like. The second front was the disagreement among military leaders and top government officials over the right strategy, especially on the question of “the surge.” Some in Washington favored it, some did not.

Then another, equally disturbing subject is raised in the book; the startling Western tendency, even in public matters, to consider protest as treason and dissent as deviant. It’s that way even in Washington, the capital of the free western world. There is a tendency to generally demand unflinching obedience, and to keep demanding it until catastrophe comes knocking at the door. Although unprejudiced examination of every argument and theory belongs to the basic principles of a democratic system, the Washington described by Woodward is marked by the expectation of a verbal “thumbs-up” to everything and one that considers any debate or opposition as illegitimate; something the other party comes up with just to restrict the President’s power.

No rebellion from rational politicians

Today we know this mindset wasn’t just restricted to the mismanagement of the war. We now can take seriously what Bush and Rumsfeld declared at the outset of their administration, namely that business principles would be applied to the management of the government where, according to the understanding of America’s first MBA President, things had to run efficiently and above all without dissenting ideas. Other opinions were tolerated only from the second row and only when the President wasn’t there. He tolerated only unanimity, the one solution that his experts had agreed upon. Anything else was stress, and stress lowered the body’s resistance, not to mention the Dow Jones. Logically, everything had to keep going onward and upward, a story that proved to be the financial markets’ downfall. Everything that stood in the way was a downer that caused bad moods, poverty and disease. With that, the Republicans eliminated the principle that open disagreement was a valid way of determining the best course of action. That, according to the philosopher/economist Karl Popper, was the reason the West was more powerful than its competition in the first place.

The problem was, everybody went along with the decisions made. Even experienced people whose careers and fortunes wouldn’t have been threatened had they opposed them; they, too, went along. There were, of course, the obligatory memoirs of former Cabinet officers relating scandalous scenes, but rational, thinking politicians never really sat down in a meeting and decided to rebel.

This book can ask the question, and it should

Bob Woodward made a transition as well, from an enlightener to a chronicler who recorded the facts that de-railed an entire administration, putting it on the wrong track and thereby perhaps causing serious crimes against innocent people. Woodward notes all this, but doesn’t show his outrage. Perhaps he felt none.

It’s puzzling why this book, ostensibly about war, ignores the testimony of those who were most affected by it; namely, the Iraqi troops and civilian population. Woodward interviewed the Iraqi security advisor – American-educated – but the other important players in the country, or even the “unimportant” residents of Baghdad, remain distant beings with individual likes and dislikes. He seems astounded to discover that there are Shi’ites in Iraq who don’t especially like Iran, as though a war of extermination had never been fought between the two nations; as if an Arab can have only one identity at a time, either Shi’ite or patriot, terrorist or freedom fighter. The question never arises as to whether or not otherwise peaceful Iraqis now take up weapons out of anger against the blatantly unfair occupation of their country by, among others, the employees of private armies like Blackwater, who are immune from prosecution even for murder. According to the Bush Doctrine, that question may never be asked. This book can ask it and it should.

A death sentence for yet more innocent Iraqis

Woodward’s book, “The War Within,” eventually degenerates into a heap of “commanding general” literature. He cedes the evaluations and the quotations to his sources: is the reader expected to draw his own conclusions? But what conclusions are they expected to draw, these people who have already decided their leaders can’t be trusted to do anything right, not when it comes to assessments and certainly not when it comes to an entire nation? Then the author’s hesitancy comes off looking not so much gentlemanly as it does neglectful of his duty.

On one occasion, the Iraqi security advisor complained that the battle against private militias shouldn’t be carried out solely or predominantly by the Americans. It would be better, he said, if the Iraqi government did that on its own. He acknowledged that the Iraqis didn’t operate as precisely as the Americans, that they would be “dirtier” and cause more deaths, but concluded that it would help stabilize the government if they didn’t leave such things to foreign troops.

That kind of horror story, a death sentence for even more innocent Iraqis, passes for rational and somehow progressive in the world into which this book delves. According to the book, things had gotten steadily worse until Bush and the group of pragmatic military advisors surrounding General Petraeus decided on a sudden and sharp troop increase. The surge resulted in a relatively peaceful time in which Bagdhad suffered only 30 bomb attacks daily.

Just like a Robert Redford movie

But that’s not the whole story. Suffering, civil strife and political impasse had plagued Iraq for years before any kind of realistic and rational solution was sought. It was all the same to them. And more: the truth about the situation there was well known and tolerated because the political guidelines emanating from the highest levels were preposterous. The book cites reports from many sources that the President wanted to hear one thing and one thing only from Iraq: the terrorist body count. It made no difference whether it was an individual soldier in the employ of an Iranian-financed militia, a Baathist ex-officer bent on revenge, or a nationalist who simply didn’t want his country occupied by foreign soldiers. That these people had nothing at all in common with Mohammed Atta wasn’t even considered. Bush simply didn’t understand that the war against the Iraqi insurgents wasn’t making America safer. Perhaps because nobody told him.

No one contradicts Bush. In the Woodward interviews, Bush seems at times dim-witted, at other times impatient. Once, when it was his lunchtime, he asked the author to be quicker asking his questions. Or he appeared oblivious. Or he suggested Woodward talk to others, to his security advisors or even to Petraeus, as if talking to them was always a good substitute for talking to the President.

The real news in the book was that Americans are carrying out clandestine operations against terrorist leaders, i.e., knock on their doors and kill them. In Woodward’s book, it all reads like a bad parody of Oriana Fallaci or Klaus Theweleit.* (Trans. note: Theweleit is an author and professor who has written on the literature produced by ex-First World War German soldiers who formed the basis of the para-military “Freikorps” that helped Hitler to power in the 1930s. His best-known work translated into English is “Male Fantasies.”)

Then Petraeus accosts us with the message that the surge was working so well it gave him an orgasm. And Bush is happy, too. That’s the insanity.

It’s similar to the Robert Redford movie “Lions for Lambs.” Politicians brief journalists on a running clandestine operation, gain their confidence and thereby gain their support, assuring them they got their exclusive story and need ask no further questions. But how do they know for certain the death squads are killing the right people and not some unpopular neighbors of theirs? Perhaps they’re killing business competitors being fingered for removal by someone. It’s the same principle we’re familiar with from the old Wild West movies: “Why do we need a sheriff when we’ve got a rope?”

Woodward, who after four books about Bush must realize what kind of cesspool he mistook for a national stage, tries to give himself cover by saying Bush’s replacement will certainly and unfortunately discover it was all actually worse than anyone suspected.

Which chronicler will be willing to record that?

*Trans. note: Theweleit is an author and professor who has written on the literature produced by ex-First World War German soldiers who formed the basis of the para-military “Freikorps” that helped Hitler to power in the 1930s. His best-known work translated into English is “Male Fantasies.”