Soon after his historic victory over John McCain, Barack Obama was ushered into a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) located deep inside the Federal building in Chicago to receive his first top-secret intelligence briefing as President-elect. According to Bob Woodward, the Watergate icon and Washington journalism grandee, the space was designed to prevent eavesdropping and thus ‘unusually small . . . windowless and confining, even claustrophobic’.

The briefing by Mike McConnell, then Director of National Intelligence, revealed little information that Obama — or any reader of Woodward’s Obama’s Wars — could not have found in a news- paper in November 2008: the dangers posed by North Korean nuclear weapons and potential Iranian ones; advances in cyberterrorism; and the growing strength of the Taliban inside Pakistan.

But this scene is nonetheless revealing, for the narrow, suffocating atmosphere in the SCIF briefing room mirrors perfectly the scope and tone of Woodward’s ‘inside’ account of Obama’s meandering, year-long path to escalating the war in Afghanistan. Pity the reader trapped in such a room for nearly 400 pages — but truly lament the soldier vaulted to his or her death or maiming on the hot, dry air of the national security/terror rhetoric so excruciatingly reconstructed by America’s most famous investigative reporter.

The difficulty in parsing Woodward’s account of the debate between the White House and the Pentagon over US policy in Afghanistan stems not only from its punishing, mind-numbing prose. Woodward is well known for relying on ‘background’ interviews in which his sources provide information under cover of anonymity.

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