Reading the anti-war vote

So what, in Woodward8217;s telling, secures for him the distinction of now being nominated as his country8217;s oldest? Besides his experience with high government office and his way around big business, 8220;a chance to prove his father that is the elder George Bush wrong8221;. Take that logic to its extreme conclusion, and the son went into Iraq to show his father how he could have fought his own war. 8220;Bush senior thought Rumsfeld was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian,8221; writes Woodward in the prologue.

This is the kind of interior dialogue that8217;s been the staple of Woodward8217;s compelling first drafts of history. Through copious interviews and well-proven sources in the highest reaches of government, he tells of how the United States was taken to war in Iraq and how it, well, botched it up. More than operational detail and neoconservative polemic, Woodward is skilled in capturing the mess through power games and mannerisms. Through, for instance, Rumsfeld8217;s snowflakes his reflections, questions and orders on unsigned pieces of white paper that galed through the Pentagon, and through President Bush8217;s refusal for interviews as the war started going badly 8220;as Bush8217;s approval ratings dropped dramatically in 2005 and 2006, so did my chances of getting another interview with him8221;.

It is found, for Woodward, in Rumsfeld memos like this one: 8220;The charge of incompetence against the US 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.8221;

The fact of the congressional elections removing Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, then, seems to have been inevitable. State of Denial was published just days before the vote, and its hints of a complex father-son relationship underpinning American foreign policy are now playing out in countless analyses of the power shift in Bush8217;s team after the Democrat conquest of Congress.

Yet, reviews 8212; like one in The New York Times this Sunday 8212; find in State of Denial an act of rewriting by Woodward. It is pointed out that in part three he goes over the period covered in parts one and two Bush at War and Plan of Attack, and edits out the patriotic attentiveness of before.

That, it could be said, is the way with the way Bush8217;s wars are being read. The American vote was sharply divided even in the early days of the Iraq invasion, and if you look at the list of international affairs and American foreign policy books published by Foreign Affairs in the past three years, the shift from that division to a consensus against the war and so the anti-war vote is evident.

Gone from this month8217;s list are muscular tracts for spreading democracy and dumping Old Europe. Gone is Natan Sharansky8217;s The Case for Democracy. And Robert Kagan8217;s Of Paradise and Power, with its call to 8220;stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that occupy the same world8221;. Gone, even is, Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan with its measured but admiring inquiry into the role of the American special forces.

Gone, too, is Imperial Hubris, an anonymous explanation on 8220;why the West is losing the War on Terror8221;. But in its stead can be found Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Gone is Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. But the absence is more than made up with Thomas Ricks8217;s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Noam Chomsky8217;s Failed States with a little help in marketing by Hugo Chavez, and States of Denial.

Election forecasts through American bestseller lists may not be such an inexact science after all.