Secrets, and the obvious, revealed

BOB WOODWARD’S “State of Denial” is the third volume in what aspires to be an inside history of George W. Bush’s wartime presidency.

Less wishfully hagiographic than “Bush at War,” less credulously detached than “Plan of Attack,” this book’s analysis essentially mirrors the shift in opinion on the administration’s conduct of the war that has occurred in the foreign policy establishment’s broad middle ground, where “reasonable” Republicans and Democrats still mingle in amiable, man-of-the-world solidarity. Still, “State of Denial” is a dogged piece of reporting -- rich in anecdote, telling detail, fascinating snippets of conversation and troubling stories heretofore untold.

This is the darker Woodward -- disquieting scene follows chilling bit of dialogue succeeded by secret memo. The administration he now portrays is a grimly feckless assemblage of dysfunction and division, disillusion and self-delusion. Yet for all the sensational revelations -- and there are several -- the overwhelming impression left at this very long book’s rather wan end is that much labor has gone into establishing that, when it comes to the Bush White House and its war in Iraq, things are pretty much what they seem.

You don’t really need a classified briefing to recognize a military and political quagmire. You don’t require an unnamed source to tell you that something is wrong when the number of Americans killed exceeds 2,700 and the acknowledged death toll among Iraqi civilians climbs toward 60,000 -- and there’s no end in sight.

In an interview Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Woodward went to the substantive heart of his appraisal: The president and his surrogates have consistently misled the American people and Congress about what’s going on in Iraq, insisting that the situation is improving, while the insurgency continues to strengthen and violence escalates. Woodward said that the insurgents now attack U.S. forces 900 times a week, roughly once every 15 minutes. Intelligence experts, he said, believe that “next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying] ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better.’ ” This is despite the fact, as the author writes in his book, that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dispatched trusted aide Philip Zelikow to Iraq in February 2005, and he reported in a secret memo that the country already was “a failed state.” Similarly, according to Woodward, generals on the ground were telling Washington that the conflict was “militarily unwinnable.”

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The spin from within

In “State of Denial,” Woodward demonstrates that although disinformation has been part of the administration’s approach to Iraq from the start, the pace picked up -- unsurprisingly -- during Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. “In the days and weeks before election day, violence surged in Iraq,” Woodward writes. “The classified figures showed that the number of insurgent attacks in Iraq had soared over the summer, going from 1,750 or so in June and July to more than 3,000 in August.... The violence was now 10 times worse than it had been when Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in May 2003 and declared that major combat was over. New Iraqi army and police units rolling out of training were being butchered.... Between 30 and 50 percent of all trained Iraqi units melted away and went home.”

In the spring, Woodward writes, the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff provided another alarming secret analysis: “A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.

On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs’ secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the “appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007.”

“State of Denial” reports that, after Bush’s reelection, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson urged the president to fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who emerges in this account as the boss from hell -- petty and petulant, vindictive and territorial, arrogant and self-pitying, a micromanager who resolutely refuses to accept responsibility for his decisions. As recently as May, according to Woodward, Rumsfeld circulated a secret memo arguing that “[t]he charge of incompetence against the U.S. government should be easy to rebut if the American people understand the extent to which the current system of government makes competence next to impossible.”

Bush, of course, decided to retain Rumsfeld -- apparently at the urging of Vice President Dick Cheney -- but sacked Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was replaced by the eerily devoted Rice.

She figures in one of the peripheral incidents Woodward recounts, one that we’re likely to hear a great deal more about in the weeks ahead. He writes that two months before Sept. 11, Rice -- then Bush’s national security advisor -- received a surprise visit from then-CIA Director George Tenet and J. Cofer Black, the State department’s counterterrorism chief. They reviewed freshly collected, top-secret intelligence pointing to an impending attack by Al Qaeda. Based on the material, they sounded the loudest warning that Osama bin Laden’s target was inside the United States. By Woodward’s account, Rice listened politely, then gave them “the brushoff.”

A former counsel to the 9/11 Commission, Peter Rundlet, wrote on the Huffington Post blog Sunday that Rice, Tenet and Black never mentioned this briefing during their testimony in public and in private, nor, he alleges, is it mentioned in any of the documents given investigators by the White House and CIA. Woodward, by contrast, writes that “[t]hough investigators had access to all the paperwork about the meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn’t want to know about.” Rundlet dismissed this explanation as “absurd” and wrote that “[a]t a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime.”

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A Saudi mentor

One of the more troubling subplots running through “State of Denial” involves Prince Bandar, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States. By Woodward’s account, when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush decided to run for president, his worried father enlisted Bandar, an old family friend, to tutor the son on foreign policy. When Bandar arrived in Austin, the younger Bush blithely observed that although he had lots of ideas about domestic policies, he didn’t have a clue about foreign affairs. The Saudi took him under his wing, but Bush proved a trying pupil, who addressed his mentor as “asshole” and “smart aleck.” (Perhaps this is how hereditary princelings affectionately address each other?) At one point, the younger Bush peevishly demanded to know why he needed “to care about North Korea.” Bandar pointed out that, if he became president, he would have 35,000 American troops sitting on the DMZ.

Oh, right....

Later, with a Bush back in the White House, Bandar bullied the president into endorsing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by threatening a total cutoff of Saudi support for U.S. policies. (Bush may never have played poker, but Bandar obviously has.) In another instance, the Saudi prince demanded -- and, worse, obtained -- two CIA officials to accompany him on a wild goose chase to Pakistan, where he hoped to kill Bin Laden. During a meeting in the Oval Office, according to Woodward, Bush personally thanked Bandar because the Saudis had flooded the world oil market and kept prices down in the run-up to the 2004 general election.

You don’t have to be Michael Moore to find all this unsettling. Equally disquieting, Woodward’s source for all this has to be Bandar or one of his intimates, acting at the Saudi’s behest. What that suggests is that, after decades of arduously cultivating the Bush family, one of the shrewdest operators on the world stage has written off George W. Bush.

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Tangential players

Unlike the previous books in this series, Bush and Cheney -- both of whom declined to be interviewed for this volume -- are remote figures in this narrative. The president informs Bandar that he prays daily and receives guidance from God and tells others that he intends to stay in Iraq, even if his supporters dwindle to his wife and dog. Cheney, meanwhile, broods obsessively on unfound weapons of mass destruction.

“State of Denial” is best read in tandem with Joan Didion’s assessment of Cheney in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. With that as background, one conclusion that suggests itself is that -- from the beginning -- Iraq really has been about Vietnam. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been the Iraq war’s principle advocates and architects. As Woodward now reveals, they’ve even introduced Henry Kissinger back into the equation, and he now is Bush’s most frequent nongovernmental advisor on foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld were bright young men headed for the top during the Nixon and Ford administrations, both of whom thought of themselves, as others did, as future presidents. Though the disaster in Southeast Asia hardly ruined them, a certain stigma has attached itself ever since.

For them, the Iraq war, the whole wrenching debate over domestic spying, the detainees and unitary executive power is all about Vietnam. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Kissinger all have been convinced for decades that the country drew all the wrong historical and governmental conclusions from Vietnam. The Reagan era intervention in Central America was a first attempt to overturn those conclusions, but it foundered on the arms-for-hostages scandal. Once George W. Bush -- for a set of Freudian family issues too tedious to belabor -- put himself in their clutches, he became the instrument of a Cheney/Rumsfeld/Kissinger attempt to abolish 30 years of history and their enduring resentment that their youthful exercise of power ended in failure, death and disaster.

So, here we are again.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com