Versailles by the Potomac

Bob Woodward is famous for persuading people to be indiscreet. This book comprises the collected indiscretions of a large number of people who have been at the heart of American policy-making about Iraq over the past five years. We can guess who some of them are. But we do not know, because most of them have been careful to speak off the record. ‘The information in this chapter comes primarily from background interviews with six knowledgeable sources,’ reads a typical sentence from the author’s endnotes. ‘Some supplied documents,’ adds another. The book is packed with quotations from documents bearing various classifications of secrecy, or portentously marked NODIS (not to be distributed) or NOFORN (not to be shown to foreigners). Only a handful of Woodward’s informants have been happy to give attributable interviews, and they tend to be the more reticent ones. ‘Don’t remember that,’ says Donald Rumsfeld every few questions; ‘doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’ Woodward certainly paints a striking picture. A small group of jealous men living in a closed world of shared values, insecure, conspiratorial and xenophobic, they compete for the attention of a president who craves nothing more than moral certainty. This is the court of Louis XIV or Tsar Nicholas II, by the Potomac.

Pre-eminent among its many villains stands Rumsfeld himself. A swaggering and manipulative bully, intellectually self-confident, indifferent to other men’s sensitivities, utterly convinced of the stupidity and obstructiveness of all around him, Rumsfeld is portrayed as the real demon of America’s policy in the Middle East. Above all he is blamed for America’s failure to plan for the civil government of Iraq in the aftermath of the campaign and the decision, disastrous in retrospect, to disband the Iraqi army and much of the civil service in pursuit of de-Baathisation. Woodward puts this down to a feeling that nation-building was for cissies, coupled with the baleful influence of westernised Iraqi exiles and a relentless turf war between the Pentagon and the State Department.