ideological criminal

Bob Woodward’s The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008 is an intimate tour of the sausage factory that ground out the “surge” strategy for Iraq. The process is grotesque, as are the inevitable excretions being tended to now by the Obama administration.

This book is surely a portrait of madness, but of two different orders. The first, Woodward is acutely aware of. It is a institutional madness. Woodward maps out the dysfunctional and damaged pathways through the executive branch decision making infrastructure, in which Bush and his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, act as a kind of bureaucratic id asserting its will through back channels and feed-back loops. The State Department plays a reluctant conscious, hesitant but ultimately thorough in its acquiescence. Finally, the Defense Department operates as the swollen and rug-burned sex organ. The “surge”, I am pretty sure, is a strategy lifted straight from an Enzyte commercial. Woodward documents the interplay between these agencies and their major players. It is a story of incompetence, reluctance, willful ignorance, suppression, distortion, ego, omission, and plain old thuggery.

Although Woodward thoroughly and convincingly treats this kind of madness, he seems to be supportive of the overall enterprise. Woodward’s voice is unmistakeably American. When he writes about the “groundbreaking” TOP SECRET covert operations initiated in May 2006, he notes DIA intelligence expert and adviser to David Petraeus had “orgasms” due to the effectiveness of these operations. Woodward adds “once again, it was American innovation that provided an edge.” I got the sense Woodward typed this page with one hand.

Woodward shows us that the current system is broken, but under the unsupported assumption that it is something that can or should be fixed. This is second order of madness; it consumes Woodward and his book.