Gossip from the War Room

Everyone understands why foreign policy should often be made in secret: If baddies overseas are involved, as they often are, it is not a good idea to give them intelligence of forthcoming moves. Yet at the same time it is almost universally agreed (sitting presidents beg to differ) that the American people have a right to know how the great decisions of war and peace are made in Washington, even if important secrets are sometimes revealed. Many newspaper reporters strive to find out who said what before this or that was decided, but Bob Woodward has made it his full-time business, periodically publishing book-length accounts compounded out of interviews with all the significant participants who were willing at the time to be interviewed by him.

Now we have his latest, “Bush at War,” starting from the intense trauma of Sept. 11 and ending somewhat inconclusively with the unresolved question of Iraq, still the subject of vehement debate inside the Bush administration. Foreign policy is a worthy subject of serious reflection, but most of us are unworthy enough to be interested not only in the process but also in the people (“Gentlemen talk about things, servants talk about people,” was the Victorian reprimand). Woodward satisfies our craving, never letting the issues of foreign policy get in the way as he concentrates on the cast of characters.

In his version, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is arrogant to the point of treating the most senior generals as office boys, an egomaniac who understands nothing but the “wanton” use of force, even to change regimes, in Iraq for example. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, on the other hand, is wise and considerate, the man who single-handedly ensures allied support for American purposes with his superb and patient diplomacy. Guess who of the two talked to Woodward?

As for President Bush, he too talked with Woodward, knowing that Powell would otherwise write his own version of instant history, as he did in Woodward’s book on the 1991 Gulf War, casting himself as the politically correct hero of cautious restraint in contrast to an impulsive George Bush senior. Thus in Woodward’s latest, we are given a George W. who is very different from the simplistic, indeed downright foolish, warmonger featured every day in the world media and in the diplomatic chatter of foreign ministries. He is a president firmly in control of his government, including the Pentagon’s civilian hawks, a president who successfully mediates the contending forces around the United States and not merely the conflicting opinions of his advisors.

Woodward’s method, such as it is, has produced a systematically biased book, the product of a type of journalism that virtually amounts to tacit blackmail: Talk to me, spill your share of secrets -- or at least your personal touchy-feely confidences -- or I will cast you as the villain. So systematic is the bias that it extends down to the second level of government in which, for example, Richard L. Armitage, Powell’s deputy secretary and a Woodward source, appears as an extraordinarily modest man who merely wants to serve his boss and must be compelled to appear on television news programs (true enough), while Paul D. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary and not a Woodward source, shows up at meetings meant for “principals” only and speaks out of turn, so that he has to be told to shut up by the president’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. Even entire institutions can be beneficiaries of Woodward’s indulgence with his sources: George J. Tenet, head of the CIA, was obviously one of them, and the result is that the book sustains the CIA’s delusion of adequacy -- grandeur would be a bit much -- even while unwittingly providing plenty of contrary evidence.

Woodward reveals the CIA’s Operation GE/SENIORS obviously without realizing that it was a ludicrous exercise in futility: Thirty Afghan agents were paid $10,000 per month to track Osama bin Laden, miraculously doing so to the point of perfection (“the Seniors seemed to have him located most of the time”) yet somehow never able to inform headquarters quickly enough to allow the launch of cruise missiles from submarines offshore. We now know, however, that Bin Laden lived a remarkably normal family life in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, surrounded by the wives, children and servants of his large household, hardly the elusive fugitive he has now become. What made the operation ludicrous was, of course, the absence of a CIA officer on the scene to remind the brave 30 of their duties. This has been a constant of CIA operations in dangerous territory for many years: the agency’s intelligence officers are just that, analysts, while its operations people are remarkably unoperational. Tenet himself has done much to change this, reviving the almost defunct “paramilitary” subset of the operations’ directorate, but a culture of risk-avoidance is not easily changed.

Woodward’s failure to recognize self-serving bureaucracies when he sees them is apparent in his account of the “combat search and rescue” issue that delayed the start of the bombing of Afghanistan for two weeks. It refers to the helicopter units that lift downed pilots parachuted into enemy-held territory to safety. Military chiefs insisted that combat search and rescue units had to be ready for action in nearby Uzbekistan before they would allow manned aircraft to bomb Afghanistan. Never mind that the Taliban had no integrated air defenses with netted radar to aim missiles and guns. Never mind that they had very few antiaircraft guns and hardly any missiles in any case.

In the end it was the “hip-shooter” Rumsfeld and his hawkish civilian aides who ensured the swift and elegant defeat of the Taliban by rejecting the conventional slow buildup-large force methods favored by most of the top military chiefs. Rumsfeld instead backed the novel combination of U.S. Special Operations forces and CIA paramilitaries with as much use of precision air power as Afghanistan’s poverty in useful targets would allow. U.S. troopers on the ground quickly energized the Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the Northern Alliance to attack the Taliban with real conviction not only because of their magical ability to direct airstrikes with great precision but also because they fought like the skilled and brave warriors they are, attracting the admiration of the Afghans as well.

Air-ground operations in Afghanistan quite unexpectedly validated the new style of “network-centric” warfare that Rumsfeld has been trying to propagate in the Pentagon from his first days in office. It evoked -- and still does -- the vehement opposition of most top generals, who naturally favor conventional methods and the big battalions. It is they who are now calling for 250,000 soldiers if there is a war against Iraq, in contrast to the smaller and more agile force that Rumsfeld evidently favors, though in a desert war against a large army, even lighter, swifter forces must include hundreds of battle tanks and all that goes with them.

The debate on the most effective operational method for defeating Saddam Hussein, therefore, continues, as does the debate over the role of Colin Powell in this conflict. He is both the secretary of State who urges diplomacy first and foremost at every juncture -- as indeed he should -- and the ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who keeps in touch with his military friends still in uniform, who have their own ways of resisting Rumsfeld’s alarming innovations and impatience to act. Even in the annals of Washington intrigue, this “triangulation” around the Pentagon’s civilian leadership -- indeed the very principle of civilian control -- is unprecedented and adds to the burden on National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley and Vice President Dick Cheney as they strive to keep the “decision making process” in some sort of balance. In that task, Rice does not need Woodward’s benevolence: It is universally agreed in Washington that she really does perform her duties as the president’s national security advisor. Which is, of course, no more than her job description -- except that most of her predecessors preferred to usurp the roles of the secretary of State or secretary of Defense, or both, serving their presidents much less well in the process.

Woodward’s reporting of these machinations is nothing more than high-level gossip about meetings about war and foreign policy rather than the substance of either. It is pretty clear from all his writings that Woodward is simply not interested in foreign affairs as such. The result is that whenever he must mention other countries, other cultures, foreign leaders or their doings, Woodward’s comments reveal an amazing degree of plain ignorance as soon as they extend beyond mere banalities. Nobody has told him, for example, that the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks and of many lesser attacks since then were not orthodox, traditional Muslims at all -- or just Muslims, to keep things simple -- but rather followers of the extreme and once very small Salafist (or Wahhabi) sect of Islam, which has only very recently been propagated around the world by the schools and mosques funded by the Saudi ruling family and its favored businessmen, like the Bin Ladens.

Lacking this bit of information, Woodward cannot explain why Bush completely disregards the potentially catastrophic repercussions on the Saudi rulers of any war against Iraq, in contrast to Bush senior, who viewed them as precious allies (as his former advisors still do, judging by their TV appearances). Because he knows little of their substance and cares less, Woodward’s reporting of the difficult and nuanced discussions that drive the decisions of war and diplomacy is not only incomplete but also badly distorted. Woodward’s tales of white hats and black hats do not begin to tell us the real story.