Current Affairs: Bob Woodward is probably most famous for All the President's Men (1974), which he co-authored with Carl Bernstein on the Watergate crisis. Since then he has authored or co-authored a number of non-fiction bestsellers, his most recent being Bush at War (2002) which is his account of the United States' response to the September 11th, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, and the war in Afghanistan that followed, writes Michael D. Higgins.
This latest, Plan of Attack, is an analysis of how George W. Bush and his cabinet took the decision to make a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. It is based on 75 interviews, completed on a basis of the interviewees not being named, but it is obvious that they were thorough in their cooperation and in the reconstruction of their diaries and personal notes. The interviews included an extensive session with both President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
The prose in this account is of a particular kind. It reconstructs the atmosphere in the mode of a film script. The narrative achieves a certain immediacy. What one gets is a set of reconstructions of relationships and conversations rather than any deep analysis of political projects or ideological disposition. The background to The Project for a New American Century, the creation of so many of the senior members of George W. Bush's cabinet, such as Paul Wolfowitz and others, is not dealt with. This is, perhaps, as one might expect. The neo-conservative cabal is already in place and our starting point is their preparation for war.
Perhaps one of the most serious conclusions that the book reveals is the deliberate attempt to connect the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers to the simmering project of a strike against Iraq. Late in the book, Woodward describes Vice-President Cheney as being in a fever. Given his experience with the previous Bush administration, he was obsessional about regime change in Iraq.
"Powell thought that Cheney had the fever. The vice president and Wolfowitz kept looking for the connection between Saddam and 9/11. It was a separate little government that was out there - Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith and Feith's "Gestapo office", as Powell privately called it. He saw in Cheney a sad transformation. The cool operator from the first Gulf War just would not let go. Cheney now had an unhealthy fixation. Nearly every conversation or reference came back to al-Qaeda and trying to nail the connection with Iraq. He would often have an obscure piece of intelligence. Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact. It was about the worst charge that Powell could make about the vice-president."
From this atmosphere flowed some of the most serious consequences of our time. It included the assertion of the principle of a pre-emptive strike by the United States, a particular aim of Cheney for some time. This moved the United States out of the realm of international law and asserted as an alternative the demands of unilateral action based on perceived interests, justified by the possession of military capacity. It was a moral moment with diplomacy not quite rejected, but relegated to the status of an irritating context.
At the heart of that particular contradiction was Colin Powell, who at times appears something like the character of Macbeth, conscious of the effects of war, but sucked into it and incapable of leaving a team and a President that were open to neither the refutation of fact or the moral evaluation of the public at home or abroad.
It is clear that the hawks in the Bush cabinet saw the attack of September 11th as their opportunity to make the case for a strike against Iraq. It is also clear, and Woodward is very valuable here, that the campaign against terrorism worldwide would be joined to both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Woodward quotes the President: "We won't do Iraq now, we're putting Iraq off but eventually we'll have to return to that question".
What is clear here from the conversations reported is an anxiety to use going to war as a kind of symbolic action that would distract from a massive failure of security. It is for historians to judge why the United States had not moved earlier on Afghanistan, why, despite pleas from Afghanis, it remained passive and continued an intelligence relationship with the Taliban. Historians, too, will use Woodward's book to analyse the moment when the strike against Iraq is added to the war in Afghanistan.
What would be amusing, if its consequences were not so tragic, are the extraordinary breaches in intelligence and indeed the gullibility of the press. This latter is only just about now being admitted by such as the New York Times.
The role of the Kurdish groups in the North of Iraq, towards whom tens of millions of dollars were directed, is described in detail. At one stage, a request for smaller change than hundred-dollar bills was made, as it was leading to inflation with $100 bills being proffered for a cup of coffee.
What emerges is something of the character of a mountain of information, be it in terms of the support for invasion, the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the purchase of uranium in Africa, culminating in the most degrading period of his career - Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in 2003.
The book is interesting, too, on George Bush's interview with Woodward as to his conversations with President Putin and Tony Blair. The former wouldn't make too much trouble, and the latter gave assurances that he would stay on to the end.
Woodward probably succeeds in avoiding most of the pitfalls of a seductive intimacy with the main players in the White House. What has emerged is a terrifying account of the preparation for illegality, the abuse of power based on known lies, the disrespect for other members of the world community, an antipathy to the United Nations, and the appalling consequences in the loss of human life on the part of both the invaded and the invaders, and the creation of the best circumstances for the recruitment into international terrorism that have existed for some time.
It is good that this illegal war has been documented by such as Woodward. However, we should reflect on what the war tells us. It took the public in so many countries around the world, often in defiance of right-wing and centre-right governments, to object on the streets. There were so many, and in such powerful positions, in the media and elsewhere, who were willing to swallow the lies. The moral response of the public around the world constitutes one of our best hopes for the recovery of some morality in politics.
Michael D. Higgins TD is Foreign Affairs Spokesperson for the Labour Party. He is a former statutory lecturer in politics and sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His third collection of poems, An Arid Season, will be published by New Island next month.
Plan of Attack. By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 470pp. £18.99