Next time, Danielle Steele ...

This summer vacation's selection for light reading has been Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," a pastiche of insider accounts of the war in Iraq, from its pre 9/11 stirrings through 2006. I realize I'm way too late to this party (given the age of the book), but better than late than never I suppose when it comes to recognizing ugly truths.

This is just about the most depressing thing I have ever read. A consistent thread through the book is people with doubts about the validity (or certainty about the invalidity) of the case for the war and management of post-Saddam Iraq keeping silent about their reservations. As Woodward describes things, it's as if no one who knew anything about the subjects of WMD, Saddam, al Qaeda, 9/11, Iraq, or the Mideast thought that any of Cheney's, Bush's, or Rumsfeld's utterances on these subjects had any basis in fact or evidence. Rumsfeld (in his own words and in descriptions by others) comes off as a truly pathological figure. Cheney comes off as, well, Cheney. And Bush comes off as even more of a disengaged idiot frat boy than we all thought he was. The "brains" behind the whole thing, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz are ivory tower hallucinators.

But the worst thing about all this is that Woodward makes it seem as if there were possibilities to do things differently. He presents a series of episodes where people who knew that facts were not as Rumsfeld presented them, that the post-war plans were insane, that the premises underlying transformation to a unified democratic Iraq were utter fiction, had an opportunity to speak the truth to Bush and failed to do so. Tenet, Rice, Powell, Garner, Bremer, myriad generals, even David Kay (the great debunker of the WMD myth) all had opportunities to be alone with Bush, and none of them spoke his or her mind. None of them told him that there were no WMD, that there was no al Qaeda-Saddam links, that transforming Iraq into a west-loving democracy couldn't happen. The best that could be expected in a "free" Iraq was more social, religious and political chaos than under Saddam, at a lower standard of living. And this was only possible with two or three times as many U.S. troops as Rumsfeld said were needed, staying in Iraq for years longer than anyone could stomach.

They all knew this, and they all said it to each other. But no one said it to Bush. Even worse, none of these figures said it in public. They stayed on through the 2004 elections protecting Bush's political butt by keeping their mouths shut. Then they resigned and moved on to their think tanks and consultancies, and still kept their mouths shut. Or even worse, like Tenet, accepted medals for keeping their mouths shut.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book, though, is that Woodward himself was privy to all of these doubts from the very beginning. He references conversations he had with all of these figures going back to the very beginning of Bush's first term. While he was busy embedding himself in the Bush administration writing two other books that told tales of the resolve and political smarts of the Bush team, he was listening to the same warning bells and doing the same thing that Powell, Tenet and Rice did. He kept his mouth shut. This is the man who toppled Nixon and exposed Iran-contra in mid-scandal. He is perhaps the one journalist who could have said "this is a house of cards" and on reputation alone forced doubts into the open and allowed dissent to be treated as something other than treason.

But he didn't. Alas. I can't say that any of these revelations changed my views about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I was opposed from the beginning. I saw the case for war as transparently implausible, and saw further that even if the worst of Bush's accusations were true it was a terrible idea that could only lead to decades of military involvement and make the world less safe for all of us. But after a while, I gave up thinking about it and talking about it. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this strategy. The only positive I can draw from this is that I now plan to make a conscious effort to pay a little more attention to Iraq and Afghanistan news and talk about it a little more. Maybe even in public.