Books: The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008

A BOB WOODWARD BOOK launch is a big deaI. No advance copies for the critics, but plenty of exclusives from the corridors of power, a few strategically placed interviews, and – in the US anyway – almost automatic bestsellerdom.

THE WAR WITHIN: A Secret White House History 2006-2008

By Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster, 512pp, £24

Review by JILL ABRAMSON

This time, with the arrival of The War Within, the final volume in his four-part Bush oeuvre, the script is the same, but the headlines mask what is really newsworthy about the book. The reported bombshells – that the Americans secretly monitored nearly every move and word of the Iraqi prime minister, and the spying techniques that were used against al-Qaeda in Iraq – are hardly shocking.

But there's something different about this book all the same. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts style. He rarely pauses to judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. He has only one angle, the close-up. Yet here, for the first time in his writing on Bush, he does stop to deliver the occasional verdict.

"Time and again," he concludes, "President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut." There's a classic example in one scene he brings to life when, at the height of violence in Iraq, Bush demands that the words "victory", "win" and "success" be restored to a speech he is about to give. That kind of detail isn't just anecdotal, but the stuff of history.

Woodward is non-ideological, so his books bitterly disappoint the cable TV pit bulls, left and right. In any case, contemporaneous reporting can seldom, if ever, deliver the brilliant texture of, say, Robert Caro's magisterial biography of Lyndon Johnson; nor does Bush deepen from book to book, as Franklin D Roosevelt does in Arthur Schlesinger's biographies of him.

Instead, it's Woodward's own evolving consciousness that furnishes the true drama of these books. There is damning material about his subject in all four volumes, but in the first two, Woodward was unable or unwilling to fully acknowledge this. As the war turned sour and Bush's flaws overwhelmed his strengths, Woodward began to reassess both Bush and his own earlier views. He ends by giving readers not just the material to draw their own judgments but a harsh judgment of Bush himself.

These books offer a chilling lesson in how not to lead. They also describe the tragic pattern of a president who operates impulsively, guided solely by his instincts, abetted but ill-served by advisers who fail in the crucial task of speaking truth to power. Even in Bush at War, the book most favourable to the White House, President Bush's leadership mode combines grandiosity ("We're going to root out terror wherever it may exist") and bluster. His bottom line, as expressed to Woodward in two interviews, is: "A president has got to be the calcium in the backbone."

In his interviews with Woodward, Bush constantly refers to his "instincts" and gut reactions. From the beginning, Woodward senses danger in a leader whose "instincts are almost his second religion". But Bush doesn't listen only to his inner voice. He also receives a powerful early lesson from Karl Rove: History always goes to the victor, whatever mistakes may be committed along the way. And so, in the subsequent three books, Bush is obsessed with being able to claim a win in Iraq.

In Plan of Attack, the author's doubts grow. When Bush tells him that "freedom is God's gift to everybody in the world ... I believe we have a duty to free people," Woodward, in a rare interpolation, asks whether such a conviction might seem "dangerously paternalistic". "Those who become free appreciate the zeal," is the president's retort.

Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, are among the sources who are let off too lightly. Powell "senses a war fever" emitted by the White House and requests an audience with the president. But once in his presence, Powell doesn't really take his full say and fails to toss "his heart on the table". Then, on the eve of the war, Woodward accepts that it was unthinkable for Powell, despite his reservations, to walk away and not put his "war uniform on". But what if Powell had publicly broken with the president over the war? Might it have made a difference? It is a question Woodward fails to ask.

In The War Within, Woodward at last confronts the reality that the casus belli had been discredited: "No WMD had been found, many saw the war as a catastrophe and Powell's reputation was irretrievably linked to it, forever damaged." And he quotes James A Baker III, the principal voice of the Iraq Study Group, who says that Powell might have been the one person who could have prevented the war.

Other hard truths finally have to be faced. General George Casey concludes that the principal problem with Iraq "is the president himself", a perception that informs the narrative as it records years of dithering during which the president stubbornly refuses to accept, even as the evidence mounts, that a military strategy based on Rumsfeld's low troop levels, and the lack of a viable post-invasion plan make the "victory" he demands thoroughly unachievable. And the White House's insistence on loyalty and optimism inhibits even the few realists left on the team.

Condoleezza Rice is one such. She knows that Bush needs to hear the sceptical, not only the best, case from his military men, but she too softens the reality for the president, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state. And she doesn't dare go around Cheney or Rumsfeld to deliver the truth.

In interviews with Woodward, Bush praises Rice's successor as national security adviser, Stephen J Hadley, as the architect of the US surge, which has reduced the number of attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country (helped by a new alliance with some Iraqi tribal leaders and Sunnis). But Woodward, appalled that Bush outsourced a failing war to his national security adviser, faults Hadley for being awe-struck by a president he calls a "visionary".

Yet he is a visionary whose sight is sometimes cloudy. In his big interview with Bush for this last book, Woodward asks the president to pinpoint the moment he decided to change his war policy and approve the surge. Stumped by the question, Bush recommends Woodward consult Hadley – "Maybe Steve knows it." This is a jaw-dropping moment, like the one in State of Denial when Woodward asks Rumsfeld to describe an instance when Bush revealed himself as a wartime leader and Rumsfeld can't think of one.

Woodward himself is most shocked by Bush's admission that in June 2006 he realised Iraq strategy wasn't working, but took no action to revise it. When Woodward asks him whether he should have sent more troops earlier, Bush responds: "I haven't spent a lot of time analysing whether more troops in 2003 would have (changed the situation]." At the height of the insurgent attacks, Bush demands the impossible: "I want to be able to say we have a plan to punch back" in order to "fight off the impression that this is not winnable."

If there is a hero in this sad tale, it is General David Petraeus, the prosecutor of the surge, on whom Woodward seems to have a crush, describing him thus: "At 53, Petraeus remained a slim man, with boyish features, famously smart, articulate and motivated."

But even Petraeus, competent though he is, remains subordinate to the single figure who dominates this four-book narrative. "In the end, one lesson remained," Woodward concludes, "a lesson played out again and again through the history of American government: of all the forceful personalities pacing the halls of power, of all the obdurate cabinet officers, wily deputies and steely-eyed generals in or out of uniform, of all the voices in the chorus of Congress clamouring to make themselves heard, one person mattered most."

The War Within includes one last epilogue – or apologia. In an effort at self-justification, Woodward points out that the seeds that grew into State of Denial and The War Within were planted and indeed had sprouted in his first two volumes. He makes a plausible case, though it would have been better if his judgments had been woven into the original texts. Even now, Woodward does not divulge his personal view of the war itself, beyond stating the obvious: "The outcome of the Iraq war, now in its sixth year, remains uncertain."

But Woodward's own judgment of the war and of Bush doesn't really matter. In the course of four books he has given readers the conversations and documents we need to reach our own judgments. He has also, however unevenly and imperfectly, supplied enough synthesis and analysis to make that judgment genuinely informed.

Sure, these books can be a slog. But they stand as the fullest story yet of the Bush presidency and of the war which is likely to be its most important legacy.