Caligula & his horse

Bob Woodword's third book on U.S. President George W. Bush is a desperate attempt to retrieve a lost reputation.

Ye gods, it doth amaze me,/A man of such feeble temper should/So get the start of the majestic world/And bear the palm alone.

- Shakespeare

WHAT was said of Julius Caesar at the high noon of the Roman Empire is far more true of George W. Bush. It is truly appalling that, at the acme of the unipolar moment, the sole superpower, the United States of America, should be ruled by a man of proven unfitness for any responsible office of state. He has ripped apart the fabric of international society; wantonly launched two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq; substantially set at naught the checks and balances the U.S. Constitution established; authorised systematic recourse to torture and violations of human rights; and lowered the tone of political discourse at home and abroad.

The wars are now proven failures. But Congress and the media played along till defeat in the reckless enterprises began to stare them in the face. Bush was made President, not by a popular verdict, but by a dishonest ruling of a politicised Supreme Court. The warnings of his severest critics have come true. Neither Caligula nor his horse could have wreaked greater havoc in Rome. The American polity is torn apart. Ethical norms are at an all-time low. Secular Iraq has been destroyed and its communities divided. Hamid Karzai, a good man, is, in effect Mayor of Kabul. Bush and his Sancho Panza, Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, are thinking furiously of an exit strategy.

Bob Woodward's book is the third in the trilogy. Bush at War appeared in 2002, Plan of Attack in 2004. They were based on his fawning interviews with Bush. The last is a desperate attempt to retrieve a lost reputation. Its theme, in the very last sentence of the book, is: "With all Bush's upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American people the truth about what Iraq had become." Bush's defects and deformities, not least a proneness to falsehood, was apparent by 2002 and more so by 2004. Bush gave Woodward access and asked colleagues to do likewise because Woodward was "reliable". Access was refused in 2005 because Woodward, sensing the public mood and the state of his own reputation, did a u-turn. "He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events," Frank Rich, one of a small band of dissenters, wrote last year before this book appeared (International Herald Tribune; December 5, 2005).

He adds: "In an analysis of Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern `inside' Washington book with The Making of the President 1960. White eventually became such an insider himself that in The Making of the President 1972 he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. `They were outsiders,' Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, `and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset.' [Emphasis added throughout.]

"Indeed it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Bush and Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11, Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that `the Vice-President is lying' and produced a story headlined `Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials' on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page [New York] Times story about Saddam's aluminium tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Borjesson, `The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war.'

"Thanks in large part to the case Woodward found so inconsequential, everyone knows that much of the American press did just the same before the war - and, unlike those Iraqi newspapers or, say, Armstrong Williams, did so gratis."

This is not a solitary aberration. It is a marked trait in an ambitious reporter who wants to be an "insider". Joan Didion exposed it in her review of Woodward's book The Agenda Inside the Clinton White House. It was published in the New York Review of Books in 1996.

Unlike Woodward, James Reston had no ambition to become an insider. It was men in power who courted him. A solitary misjudgment in trusting the deceitful Henry Kissinger gravely harmed the reputation of one of the greatest reporters of all time. India has had many aspiring, if less talented, Woodwards; but all too few Restons. No journalist, reporter or commentator should forget Ghalib's counsel: Banakar faqiron ka hum bhes, Ghalib/ Tamashae ahle karam dekhte hain (Putting on the garb of a faqir, Ghalib/I watch the games the high and mighty play).

"I am fiery," Bush told Woodward in August 2002, without affecting his admiration, apparently. This book removes the few clothes the Emperor wore in the eyes of some. To George W. Bush the presidency was "a chance to prove his father wrong". His father "got into office and had no plan". George W. Bush never consulted his father. "I don't want to be like my father. I want to be like Ronald Reagan," he told Senator John McCain. He "came to the presidency with less experience and time in government than any incoming President since Woodrow Wilson in 1913", Woodward belatedly notes. Wilson became a tragic hero; Bush is an exposed fraud. Why did he run for the presidency when, on his own admission, "I don't have the foggiest idea about international foreign policy"? Condoleezza Rice was told: "I want you to run my foreign policy for me." He knew that "there has to be a compelling reason to run" and began searching for it desperately. It has proved as elusive as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. He had one strong commitment though - tax cuts.

Richard Armitage, who became his Deputy Secretary of State, told his close friend Colin Powell, who became Secretary of State, that he was "not sure Bush filled the suit required of a President... he was not sure Governor Bush understood the implications of the United States as a world power".

The vulnerable attract flatterers. "You have got great instincts... trust your instincts." This is the very claim Bush made to the author on August 20, 2002. He was "fiery" and acted on instinct. "I want a plan of action" immediately on being sworn in as President, he instructed his aide Karl Rove.

Bush played with Rove's toys: a battery-powered contraption that hurled obscenities on the pressing of a button and another that produced the sound of breaking wind. His CQ is on a par with his IQ.

Rice was no adviser to a President who insulted dissenters within the administration. She enlisted Robert D. Blackwell, former Ambassador to India and her former mentor, as her aide. The problem, she warned him was "the dysfunctional U.S. government". She was as energetic in branding anyone who did not concur as disloyal, Armitage noticed. Her colleague Stephen J. Hadley, now National Security Advisor, reported what people said of Blackwell - "disruptive". There were two State Department Inspector-General Reports that criticised his management style in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.

Bush did not encourage discussion when the principals met at the National Security Council, with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld on one side and Colin Powell on the other. "Bush never had the benefit of a serious substantive discussion between his principal advisers. And the President, whose legs often jiggled under the table, did not force a discussion." Rice played along. By 2005 she began sidelining Cheney, to his dismay and disbelief.

Not one reputation emerges unscathed from Woodward's book; including his own. During the Second World War, General George Marshall told President Roosevelt, "Mr. President, don't call me George." Advisers with character must maintain a distance from the fount of power. Colin Powell allowed himself to be used, only to be discarded as a squeezed lemon. He deserves no sympathy. It was not loyalty but survival that governed his instincts. "Powell had the potential to change the course here", by telling the President that "this is the wrong course". At one point "he had tremendous power", Senator Carl Levin, a veteran of the Armed Services Committee said to the author. But Powell was no adviser. He was a functionary. He could meet Bush for 20 minutes in a week; and in the presence of Cheney, who loathed him, as did Rumsfeld.

When Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed Powell that he was out after the 2004 election, "Powell became much more emotional than Card had expected". He relished public office. On January 13, 2003, Bush informed Powell that he had decided on war with Iraq - "I want you with me." When Powell replied, "I'm with you, Mr. President", he knew that the intimation was a belated one. The decision had all but been taken the very day after September 11, 2001. At a dinner party in Islamabad in June 2002, at which some of the best minds in Pakistan's Foreign Office were present, the late Agha Shahi, former Foreign Minister, confidently predicted that Bush would attack Iraq. By early 2003 none was in doubt about that.

Woodward's book is well-sourced and he cites his sources meticulously. But American books of reportage are heavily padded with trivia and reproduce lengthy conversations; incredibly, in direct quotes. It is a feat.

Ron Suskind's book, which professes to go "deep inside America's pursuit of its enemies since 9/11", conforms to this pattern. Both books record the neglected warning by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the President's Daily Brief on August 6, 2001 - "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.". Rice took no notice of it. Neither did Bush.

It is in this ambience that his aides decided to secure "intellectual content" for their plans. Among the bright minds enlisted were men noted for their antipathy towards Islam and the Arabs. "Bernard Lewis, a Cheney favourite" and Fouad Ajami.

"Everything will be measured by results," Karl Rove said in 2002. By this test, the policies Bush has pursued stand condemned. Suskind's book concentrates on "the one per cent doctrine" formulated by Cheney. It is a very useful addition to the literature on this period. Suskind reports that "few people outside the Bush family itself understood that the two Presidents (Bush Sr. and Jr.) were not particularly close".

He adds: "A new mission had been born in neoconservative think tanks and in the pronouncements of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and others during the 1990s, as they pined in exile. The idea, simply stated, was to be unashamed, and unfettered, in the use of power, now that America finally stood alone as the world's only super-power. Global accords on everything from greenhouse gases to international courts, many of which had long ago been designed and encouraged by the Unites States, now were seen as constraints, threads binding Gulliver. Such agreements were for lesser countries. They were to be shaken off - which was what happened in early 2001 when the Bush administration took over."

9/11 provided an opportunity that was not to be missed. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," Cheney said. He paused to assess his declaration. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," he added. "It's about our response." This is the Cheney Doctrine. Even if there is just a one per cent chance of the unimaginable coming true, act as if it is a certainty.

It is not about "our analysis", as Cheney said. It's about "our response". As Suskind remarks - "This doctrine - the one percent solution - divided what had largely been indivisible in the conduct of American foreign policy: analysis and action. Justified or not, fact-based or not, `our response' is what matters. As to `evidence', the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply. If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction - and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time - the United States must now act as if it were a certainty."

All curbs, legal and moral, domestic and international, were to be flouted. Lawyers in residence obliged with opinions, including support for torture. Sample this kind of torture of one suspect: "According to CIA sources, he was water-boarded, a technique in which a captive's face is covered with a towel as water is poured atop, creating the sensation of drowning. He was beaten, though not in a way to worsen his injuries. He was repeatedly threatened, and made certain of his impending death. His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights. He was, as a man already diminished by serious injuries, more fully at the mercy of interrogators than an ordinary prisoner."

From 2001 to 2005, the crucial period, Cheney held sway over Bush. There was no mistaking who was Caligula and who the horse. Where their partnership takes the U.S. and the world in the remaining two years of the Bush presidency remains to be seen.