Bob Woodward’s latest book about the Bush Administration, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, will be published tomorrow and is excerpted today in The Washington Post, where he and Carl Bernstein earned a Pulitzer for their Watergate reporting. Woodward is the paper’s associate editor.
The excerpt, available here, is the history of how the Bush administration grappled with the hell the war in Iraq had become:
That summer [2006], with U.S. casualties eclipsing 2,500 deaths and nearly 20,000 wounded, Bush acknowledged to himself what he was not saying publicly: The war had taken a perilous turn for the worse, with 1,000 attacks a week, the equivalent of six an hour. “Underneath my hope was a sense of anxiety,” Bush recalled in a May 2008 interview. The strategy was one “that everybody hoped would work. And it did not. And therefore the question is, when you’re in my position: If it’s not working, what do you do?”
Friday night, the White House took the unusual step of issuing a lengthy statement claiming Woodward distorted the effectiveness of the “surge” policy in Iraq. Woodward’s facts are not challenged, but his assertion that it was not the primary factor behind the drop in violence is disputed. Woodward cites four factors overall, notably covert operations.
He also reports that the US spied on Iraq’s prime minister, an allegation that has angered Iraq, which plans to ask for an explanation from Washington.
This is his fourth book about the Bush Administration and is based on “more than 150 interviews with the president’s national security team, senior deputies and other key intelligence, diplomatic and military players. Woodward also conducted two on-the-record interviews with Bush in May.”
Woodward will be interviewed on 60 Minutes tonight and by Larry King tomorrow night. He will be online at the Post’s Book World on Wednesday at 1PM EDT for a chat; questions can be submitted here. The Post’s review will appear next Sunday.
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