State of Denial
Bush at War, Part III
Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2006
526 pages • $30
Review by BEN DALBEY
SOMEONE HAS screwed up Iraq, and in Bob Woodward’s last installment of his Bush at War trilogy, pretty much everyone in the U.S. administration gets a chance to play “the blame game.”
Even the series itself—from the initial hagiographic Bush at War, to the more critical second book, Plan of Attack, which disclosed the fact that Bush was planning and pushing for an invasion of Iraq only months after the September 11 attack, to the current and uniformly damning State of Denial—can be seen as a chronicle of the process by which an initially enthusiastic Washington establishment has abandoned Bush and his sinking, burning ship.
There is plenty of blame to go around. There is the bureaucratic dysfunction of the U.S. government, which resulted in things like the supposed new leader of a “free Iraq,” Iyad Allawi, flying around for several months in a plane emblazoned with a gigantic American flag and “United States Air Force” on the side because no one could figure out who was responsible for getting him a different one.
There is the stay-in-power-at-all-costs focus of the White House, which meant that teams working on Baghdad’s electrical system were resorting to burning fuel oil in the city’s generators in the lead up to the 2004 U.S. elections, thus allowing the administration to claim “more lights are on in Baghdad,” but resulting in the collapse of the system a few months later.
There is the well-documented and very real political infighting between the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department that made any decision or implementation an essentially Herculean task.
There is the complete absence of any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq—and the fact that people like Colin Powell and Dick Cheney knowingly used outdated lists of former weapons sites, satellite photos of people loading boxes of “either WMDs or children’s bicycles” into trucks bound for Syria, and statements from informants known to be fabricators to make the case for war.
There is the imperial arrogance of L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (known variously as “Can’t Provide Anything” or “Children Playing Adults”). Woodward describes how Bremer managed to alienate even the Iraqi expatriates and CIA assets hand-picked by the U.S. to run Iraq as a puppet government with his demand that he would personally make every decision about every aspect of the “new free Iraq.”
There is George Bush. Neither a pawn of Cheney nor the proverbial village idiot, but an American prince—an “intellectually lazy” ideologue who has never doubted his right to rule, and who even in cabinet meetings never strayed from his script of generic campaign-trail statements about a “plan for victory” and the need to “stay the course.”
Woodward interviewed Bush four times for his three books, but the last interview was in December 2003. All subsequent requests were denied. In the 2003 interview, it took Woodward more than five minutes of face-to-face, direct questioning to get Bush to admit what everyone already knew—that no WMDs had yet been found in Iraq. As Bush said at the time, “I’m probably sounding incredibly defensive all of a sudden.”
But mostly, there is Donald Rumsfeld. Woodward, through extensive interviews with Rumsfeld and others, paints a picture of a Machiavellian egomaniac on a mission to consolidate his own power, with nothing but contempt for every other human on the planet.
Lamenting the fact that the U.S. is a democracy (“The current system of government makes competence next to impossible”), Rumsfeld complained to Woodward that “there’s something about the body politic in the United States that they can accept the enemy killing innocent men, women and children and cutting off people’s heads, but have zero tolerance for some soldier who does something he shouldn’t do.”
Woodward’s book is focused on the situation “inside the beltway,” which now includes the U.S. fortress in Baghdad, dubbed “the Green Zone.” This orientation means that there are some important questions that State of Denial does not ask or answer, and some problematic assumptions underlying Woodward’s basic thesis—which is that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was driven by “idealism.”
According to Woodward, the invasion was a noble endeavor to bring democracy to the Middle East that was poorly executed. Woodward repeatedly emphasizes the idea that Rumsfeld’s focus on “transformation” of the U.S. military into a smaller, more modern fighting force meant that not enough troops were sent in to occupy the country after the initial invasion. However, no one explains why the “shock and awe” bombing that began the invasion was not “overwhelming” enough, or how a few hundred thousand more troops trained to kill and destroy would have been more successful agents for democracy.
The second and related assumption that seeps through Woodward’s work is that to the extent that Iraqis exist, they are either “wily” opportunists duping the U.S. to serve their own greedy ends, children who don’t understand or want democracy, or terrorists.
Describing one White House meeting, for example, Woodward writes,
[National Security Advisor Steven] Hadley said that Iraq was like “an abused child,” and the U.S. would have to continue to act as its caretaker. Rumsfeld said strongly and repeatedly, the Iraqis need to be given the chance to fail and fall on their faces, and only then would they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and come up with solutions. He used the analogy of a parent trying to teach a child to ride a bike. They had to take off the training wheels and remove their hand from the back of the seat or they’d wind up with a 40-year-old who could not ride a bicycle. Condoleezza Rice was between Hadley and Rumsfeld, once remarking, “Let’s let them try to pedal on their own, but we better be there to catch them.”
In another National Security Council meeting in 2005, Woodward writes that “the discussion turned to the caliber of people who would be available in Iraq [to lead a government], and general frustration was voiced once again about the absence of a Washington or Jefferson, let alone a John Adams or lesser lights.”
Woodward barely recognizes that ordinary Iraqis oppose the occupation—and in no way hints that such opposition might be justifiable. In fact, while most of the book has Woodward quoting or paraphrasing others, it is Woodward himself who describes the anti-occupation insurgency as “the forces of terror in Iraq.” Elsewhere, he describes the anti-occupation Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr as a “warlord.”
To explain why sectarian violence remains high, Woodward paraphrases the thoughts of current national intelligence director and former U.S. “ambassador” to Iraq, John Negroponte:
The key was that Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug who had become the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, had been successful in getting people pissed off at each other. In some respects [Zarqawi’s bombings were] like throwing a fist at someone in a crowded bar that happened to be filled with permanent enemies.… Iraq was now much more fertile ground for sectarian violence. Zarqawi had created that fertile ground.
Nowhere does Woodward mention that, for the last three years, U.S. commanders recruited and used the Kurdish peshmerga and Shiite militias to kill Sunnis and fight what they viewed as a Sunni-based insurgency. He does not mention that Shiite death squads such as the “Wolf Brigade” were intentionally incorporated by the U.S. into Interior Ministry operations. Nor does he mention that Negroponte’s primary “accomplishment” before his Iraq appointment was serving as a front man for U.S.-funded death squads in the dirty war against Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s.
The U.S. did not drop ten times the amount of munitions used in “Gulf War I” in the first days of the 2003 invasion in an “idealistic” effort to bring democracy to Iraq. The Iraqis are not suffering the proportional equivalent of a 9/11 every week so that they can be free. The U.S. has tried very hard to put together a “pro-Western,” undemocratic, ethnically divided puppet government powerful enough to rule the Iraqi people. They have failed—not because of “poor execution”—but because the Iraqi people themselves have fought back.
Although he doesn’t seem to know it, Woodward is taking a more critical look at Bush’s motivations and abilities because the Iraqi people have created the “quagmire.” It is the Iraqi people who have prevented the U.S. from consolidating control over their country and going on—as Bush pitched it to Jay Garner in 2003—to “do Iran.” These are not terrorists, but mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who are struggling to survive in spite of the best efforts of the most arrogant, ignorant, incompetent, and powerful group of people in the world.
