Letting Bush off easy.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Book Review

Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster. 467 pages. $28.00.

By now, Bob Woodward's latest book on the Iraq War has gotten reams of publicity, and some of the main revelations have already circulated. We've learned that Bush and Rumsfeld used $700 million in appropriations that were earmarked for the war in Afghanistan to prepare for war against Iraq. We've heard how CIA Director George Tenet boasted that the intelligence agencies had a "slam dunk" case against Saddam Hussein for harboring weapons of mass destruction. And we've gotten more evidence of Bush's messianic militarism as Woodward revealed that Bush sought strength not from his own father but from a "higher father."

The book has other telling details about the President and the players around him. And it provides a blow-by-blow of the military buildup (more war plans from Tommy Franks than I ever care to read about again), a full choreography of the diplomatic Kabuki dance, as Colin Powell called it, and a running soap opera of the bitchy in-fighting among the cabinet officials.

Woodward can't resist, however, intruding on the narrative by citing his own hobnobbing. Do we have to hear about a dinner he hosted for Rumsfeld in 1989? Or a dinner he had with Senator Bob Graham?

But that's the least of the problems. For all the dish, Woodward lets Bush off easy and ultimately distorts the historical record.

Here are some of the juicy things you might not have read about yet.

Woodward depicts the President Select as a goofy ingenue when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell went to the Pentagon to meet with the Joint Chiefs ten days before inauguration. During the briefing, Bush acted like a puerile frat boy, grabbing a peppermint from Defense Secretary William Cohen's plate and also taking one from Army General Hugh Shelton. (For his part, Cheney fell asleep at the briefing, Woodward says.)

Woodward confirms Richard Clarke's assertion that the Administration was obsessed with Iraq. At a pre-inaugural briefing from CIA Director George Tenet, Bush and Rice heard about the three most serious threats to national security: Osama bin Laden, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and China. "Iraq was barely mentioned," Woodward says. But "on the seventeenth day of the Bush Presidency, Monday, February 5, Rice chaired a principals committee meeting ... to review Iraq policy."

And Woodward confirms that Rumsfeld, at 2:40 p.m. on the afternoon of September 11, "raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks."

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