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CounterPunch
December
5, 2002
Woodward's Bush
by PIERRE TRISTAM
Bob Woodward is a celebrity reporter perceived
as the ultimate insider, but for the wrong reasons. He does not
reveal anything. He is not analytical or critical, a skeptic
of any sort or a questioner of any depth, and context is a concept
as foreign to him as foreign policy. He only conveys an image
the "principals" on the inside, as Woodward loves to
call them, want to reveal.
Whether his book is about "The Commanders"
of the first Gulf War, "The Secret Wars of the CIA,"
"The Agenda" of the Clinton White House or "The
Choice" in the 1996 presidential election, Woodward's loyal
method explains why he has ready access to all those secret memos,
legal pads, National Security Council minutes and CIA briefing
papers that make up the bulk of his bulky books, and why most
principals in the end choose to speak with him as opposed to
an actual reporter. He is the print equivalent of a White House
photographer, transcribing official moods and postures usually
in a light most favorable to those who do speak with him, and
most unfavorable to those who don't. The books zoom up the bestseller
charts for the same reason voyeuristic books about celebrities'
tics and tiffs do: Inquiring minds want to know, and a Woodward
book is as close as they'll get to a reality show from the White
House situation room.
"Bush at War," Woodward's latest,
is a competent, plodding chronicle of the Bush cabinet's 100
days from Sept. 11 to the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
A few scoops about the president's sleeping problems or the secretary
of defense's catfights with the secretary of state are sprinkled
along the way to keep the story moving, like sex scenes in a
Danielle Steel novel, but the book is remarkably devoid of anything
new or surprising. No average consumer of 22 minutes of daily
news would be surprised to know that the president is impulsive,
intolerant of doubt or second-guessing, that the secretary of
defense is tyrannical, that the vice president can't wait for
another war, that the secretary of state's love of coalitions
makes him the odd man out in an administration of shoot-first
unilateralists, or that the CIA buys off enemies with trunks
of taxpayer cash. (It is surprising that dozens of Taliban chiefs'
defections can be bought off at $50,000 per while lesser foot
soldiers have ended up in shackles at Guantanamo Bay.)
If that's all it was, "Bush at War"
wouldn't warrant more than the usual reviews and chat-show buzz
every Woodward book generates. But even by Woodward's standards,
this is much less a journalist's book than a White House manifesto,
a managed reconstruction of recent events not for the sake of
telling the story of those events, but as a projection of events
to come. What B-52s do to soften up enemy ground ahead of a military
invasion, "Bush At War" is doing to soften up Bush's
coming war on Iraq and possibly more. Because "Bush at War"
is above all a Portrait of the President As a Grown-Up, but a
grown-up who seems to have no qualms about remaking the world
in line with his messianic visions. "I'm here for a reason,
and this is going to be how we're going to be judged," Bush
said shortly after Sept. 11, explaining why the attacks would
prove to be such a huge "opportunity." "There's
nothing bigger than to achieve world peace," he would say
again and again a Miss America-like idealist, but as Commander
in Chief of the most lethal army in history.
The book's implications are frightening
not just because they raise the very questions that aren't being
asked, but because the "inside" information coincides
so accurately with what's been perceived on the outside all along.
The attacks of Sept. 11 were a pretext, and so is the so-called
war on terrorism. The aim is much larger. The question is not
whether the Bush cabinet will take on that aim, or whether it
can convince Americans to endorse it. The question is how, and
when. And part of the answer is a book like "Bush at War,"
which achieves both the "how" and implies the "when."
It invites that mythical average American to have a seat at those
super-secret NSC meetings, to watch the commander in chief in
action and to sense his zeal for "world peace." It
turns the reader into a partner in the grand design, an insider
who, like most members of the Bush cabinet, don't question the
president's aims, but tell him what he wants to hear. The president,
Woodward writes, is "casting his mission and that of the
country in the grand vision of God's master plan." As such,
what he wants to hear from his cabinet is how to turn the Battle
Hymn of the Republic into kinetic energy for the Pentagon. What
he wants to hear from Americans is "You da man."
The book's title summarizes the 352-page
manifesto without meaning to be so reductively simple minded.
And yet the meaning of the Bush White House is exactly that simple,
that mindless. It is about Bush's war not the nation's, not the
world's. To a president who thinks he's personally doing God's
work and the world a favor, a doctrine needs be no more complicated
than "you're either with us or against us," with one
correction. He actually means, "You're either with me or
against me." Richard Nixon would be proud.
Pierre Tristam
is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer and columnist.
He can be reached at ptristam@att.net.
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December 1,
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