Bob Woodward-Obama's War-Book Review by Yusuf Ergen

Book Review

“Obama’s Wars”

The Story Inside

By

Bob Woodward

 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

441 pages

A story concerning about a house which for more than 200 years has been more than just the home of the Presidents and their families would be very attractive. Of course the most attractive part of that house would not be the family issues, it is preferable that President’s closest comrades’ stories. And maybe a journalist would only the unique address to detect the ‘what is going on’ in that House. It’s well-known that the need of options cynically may divide the president’s advisers and the executives immersed themselves in the details of the decision making that utterly produced a diversified version of the “process” strategy in practicing foreign policies. 

The latest versions of a ‘clash’ in the White House over such a process that joint chiefs were similarly split over in Afghanistan’s policy while the commanders working on the ground.

And also while the President Barack ‘Hussein’ Obama’s suffering push on how to act forward in what he has called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan has been broadly reported. Here we see one of the America’s preeminent investigative reporters and non-fiction authors Bob Woodward sets out to tell in “Obama’s Wars-The Inside Story” actually is fairly well-known.

Woodward undersigns in-depth reporting and access to first hand source, even includes President Obama, and documents provide are the voices and detailed sketches that focus on the people in the White House down to the names.

There are sedate explanations abundantly in “Obama’s Wars, The Inside Story” that includes intelligence assessments on al-Qaida’s ongoing attempts to recruit more terrorists from among the over 30 countries whose nationals do not need even visas while entering the United States.

For example according to one daily briefing dated May 26,2009 (Page 121-122), at least 20 holders of American, Canadian or Western European passports are being trained by al-Qaida in Pakistani safe havens.

Within the book the readers would notice that things are not much sophisticated as widely known. And also there is no room for such conspiracies at all. As Woodward put it in the book, during the last presidential election in 2008, U.S. intelligence services caught a Chinese hacking into the computers both camps used to run their campaigns. When the president-elect Obama got his first private briefing from Admiral Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, he figure out that for eight years there were “no strategy” for struggle the Afghan war. And the contingency plan for military action against Iran dated to the Carter administration and even had no plans at all for dealing with the growing al-Qaida presence in Yemen and Somalia. (Page 34-35)

While there were no contingency plans exist for dealing militarily if nuclear-armed Pakistan collapses, there is “a retribution plan” in place, which had been developed by the Bush administration. As Gen. L. James Jones had several get-togethers and meals with Pakistani Ambassador Haqqani in a hope to work out a deal he figures out Pakistan wants his nuclear programs to become legitimate. (Page 345).  

Plus, the contingency planning had become the weakest point of the White House in which the book shows that was the Bush Administration responsibility of lacking. “One of the closest held secrets of President Bush’s inner circle,” Woodward writes, “was that the president had lost his appetite for military contingency planning. The tough-talking, saber- rattling Bush Administration had not prepared for some of the worst- case scenarios the country might face.”  (Page 35)

According to Woodward, Bush convened the last National Security Council before leaving the office. In that meeting Bush decided to hold back a report commissioned from his Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute on the Afghan situation. The review stated that the United States had no coordinated strategy in Afghanistan, Woodward says "which we were neither losing nor winning the war there, that the local government was totally corrupt and that the far strategic threat to American security was in Pakistan. "

In the book Woodward gives a severe account of the secretive visit of VP Joe Biden and Sen. Lindsey Graham, made to Islamabad and Kabul on Obama’s behalf. Both of them faced up to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari over his intelligence service’s ties to the Taliban and the al-Qaida that operates in his country. In Kabul there was an angry facing up with President Hamid Karzai. In the intelligence assessment it says Hamid Karzai is a manic-depressive person.

Woodward’s picked up every quotation in an eclectic manner that the reader easily draws the picture which guides the non-strategic approach to Afghanistan is the policy. For example, U.S military briefers told Biden that “We haven’t really seen an Arab here in a couple of years.” For all purposes, there was no al-Qaida (in Afghanistan). Al-Qaida was a Pakistani problem.”  Woodward adds, everything Biden saw seemed to remind him of Vietnam, which made him “more convinced than ever” that the United States had slipped into a chaos. (Page 65-70)

Pulitzer Prize Winner Woodward gives much more gossips in the book and he gives some ironical character analysis. John Podesta compares Obama to the hyper-rational, inexpressive, poker faced Mr. Spock in “Star Trek. The former Clinton White House of Chief of Staff John Podesta who managed the transition for Obama. Podesta; “Obama was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. I’m not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charged the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics.” (Page 38)

In his face-to-face interview with Woodward, Obama explained his predecessor’s failure to do critical strategic and contingency planning. Obama: “Wars absorb so much energy on the part of any administration that even if people are doing an outstanding job, if they’re in the middle of a war - particularly one that’s going badly, as it was, obviously, for a three-year stretch there in Iraq - that’s taking up a huge amount of energy on the part of everybody. And that means that there are some things that get left undone.” (Page 35)

That is Obama’s War

Yusuf Ergen