Bob Woodward describes the war within the war room

DelMio.com (MCT) - If journalist and author Bob Woodward is a master of uncovering secrets, he also understands the power of keeping secrets.

By the time his latest book came out Monday, Woodward had what every author covets: advance media buzz. What would Woodward reveal this time about the Bush administration's handling of the war in war in Iraq? This time, unlike the last, Woodward's extensive interviews included sessions with the president. On Sunday, the Washington Post, where Woodward is an editor, began a four-part series of excerpts of the 487-page new book, which is Woodward's fourth on the Bush White House.

In his latest reporting, Woodward documents not only internal dissension, but conflicting reports about what was actually happening in Iraq. In one instance in the summer of 2006, for example, Bush was getting daily top-secret updates of escalating bloodshed from a 36-year-old security adviser, Meghan O'Sullivan.

In one dire report to the president, according to Woodward, O'Sullivan quoted an intelligence assessment saying that "violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining." O'Sullivan, with a doctorate from Oxford, had spent a year in Iraq.

Yet at the same time, Bush was getting a far different upbeat assessment from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq at the time. Casey, the book says, was insisting Iraq would be largely stable in a year and that most American troops would be headed home.

Meanwhile, U.S. casualties that summer exceeded 2,500 deaths, with nearly 20,000 wounded.

Here is an except that sets the stage for what's to follow:

"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?'

"This is the untold history of how the Bush administration wrestled with that question. Compiled from classified documents and interviews with more than 150 participants, it reveals that the administration's efforts to develop a new Iraq strategy were crippled by dissension among the president's advisers, delayed by political calculations and undermined by a widening and sometimes bitter rift in civilian-military relations."

In effect, the book describes two competing wars: one in Iraq and another within the Bush administration.

A blog by Washington Post editors says that the early takes on Woodward's latest book suggest it delivers a mixed assessment of Bush's performance, compared to overall positive evaluations in Woodward's first two books on Bush followed by the harshly critical "State of Denial."

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Diane Evans is a former Knight Ridder columnist and is now president of DelMio.com, a new interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.

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