As The Curtain Falls

The Age

Saturday November 1, 2008

Bruce Wolpe - Bruce Wolpe has worked on several Democratic political campaigns. He is director of corporate affairs for Fairfax Media

Bob Woodward plumbs the depths of George Bush's failed presidency, writes Bruce Wolpe.

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008

By Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster, $49.95

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism

By Ron Suskind

Simon & Schuster, $34.95

COMES NOW THE BARD of the Potomac, Woodward, with his last play on the Bush Administration, George II, Part IV, replete at the outset with its dramatis personae, from the President of the United States, reprised yet again by the Squire from Texas, now greying and resigned, and with a cast of dozens from Condoleezza Rice, who formerly played the national security adviser and who is now Secretary of State, to Robert Gates, new to this history as Secretary of Defence, and ministers and aides and officials and generals and most of all, David Petraeus, the wisest and most successful military viceroy of his generation, who devises the strategy that comes to be known as the Surge, and which stabilises, if not saves, the far province of Iraq.

There is not a love story in this play, but there are undertones of romance, especially between Bush and Stephen Hadley, his national security adviser, and between Bush and Petraeus. As Maureen Dowd so enticingly noted more than a decade ago: "Like all Washington love stories, the intimacy is between two men." They are hot.

As with watching a magnificent athlete, such as Tiger Woods or Michael Phelps, one sits in marvel of Bob Woodward and his craft. The War Within opens in June 2006 with President Bush and General Casey, the commander in Iraq, assessing what is going wrong with the war and what needs to be done. There are only the two of them on the veranda of the American Embassy in Baghdad, and the conversation is in quotes.

Woodward also has 11 pages of quotes of one of the most important strategic meetings of the war, and quotes of Bush's appearance before the ill-fated Iraq Study Group.

This is astonishing reporting and Woodward is the master.

A lot of the anger in his last book, State of Denial, has been blunted. The War Within is the story of how Bush and his war cabinet and generals and advisers and outside influencers fought ferociously over how to come to grips with Iraq as a failed state. Bush and Hadley ultimately determined that the answer was not a drawdown to force the Iraqis to take responsibility for their country, but a surge of US forces, cunningly deployed, to snuff the nihilism of al-Qaeda in Iraq, allowing the Maliki government room to consolidate functioning authority.

What is so interesting is not only that it took so long to put in place a new strategy - one really has to wonder, continually, at the very competence of the Bush Administration, from Iraq to Katrina to the meltdown on Wall Street - but that the Pentagon and the State Department had concluded that the way to win possible limited victory was to start heading out.

But there were two problems with this picture. Bush himself is a stubborn contrarian, and he was not going to leave Iraq quietly. And in late 2006, a sotto voce choir of former generals and military experts, such as Robert Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, pushed hard for the surge option.

Their advocacy coincided with the process initiated by Hadley, who succeeded Rice as national security adviser, for a full review of Iraq policy and its future. Hadley effectively rolled the Pentagon, euthanising its review that was going to conclude - with the support of the commanders in Iraq, the Joint Chiefs, and Rice - that it was time to build and start marching down the exit ramp.

We will not know whether the surge has succeeded, or merely postponed the inevitable, until it is over. And it will not be a success if it means that Iraq will unravel if the Americans leave. Petraeus himself calls the progress registered "fragile and reversible".

George II, Part IV, concludes with Woodward on stage with the ghosts of the Bush presidency, telling his audience: "By his own ambitious goals of 2001, Bush had fallen short. He had not united the country, but added to its divisions ... He had not rooted out terror wherever it existed. He had not achieved world peace. He had not attained victory in his two wars."

Ron Suskind's The Way of the World shows us that the Kite Runner lives. A political-strategic drama, it unfolds like last year's cloying cinematic melodrama, Babel, a story of interweaving threads that come together in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan last December. The human dimension, in Suskind's post-9/11 world, is the encounter of younger Muslims who have life experiences with the West, and whether they transcend their past or remain trapped by it.

Two of the most engaging episodes involve a young Muslim investment banker from Pakistan, and a young Afghan student who may become a teacher, who are confronted, ultimately, with the question, in facing a moral choice of modern life: "What do you think?" It is a question that captures the essence of the American Revolution, of Jefferson and de Tocqueville, and that defines the collision course we are inevitably on with jihadist Islam. These are insightful encounters, and well

told.

Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has three Woodwardian blockbuster exposes of his own. First, that Bush and Cheney, and the British, knew that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction before the war, and decided to ignore that fact and invade anyway. Second, that the CIA ordered the forgery of a letter from the former head of Iraqi intelligence, secreted after the war by the Americans in Jordan, that "documented" a meeting of al-Qaeda in Iraq before 9/11. Third, that a comedy of errors led to the bungling of a secret meeting with the Iranians in 2003 - a session that might have led to a process of bringing Iran more into concert with US strategic interests. The CIA man blew the meeting and Iran is on the other side of the fence.

But suffusing the Suskind narrative is the inexorable certainty that somehow, somewhere, sometime, a nuclear weapon will be detonated on American soil. It is not if, but when, because not enough is being done to stop it. Suskind tells this story too.

The Way of the World is not over, and it probably has a horrible ending. It's scarier than Woodward, because the cleansing process of democracy and Tuesday's election will rid us of the Bush crowd but not the threat of nuclear terrorism.

Bruce Wolpe has worked on several Democratic political campaigns. He is director of corporate affairs for Fairfax Media.

© 2008 The Age

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