I just finished reading Bush at War by Bob Woodward, which I had put off for way too long. I thought it would be appropriate to write a review for a dailyKos diary as some of my thoughts might bring insight to our ongoing discussion regarding post-September 11th security issues.
Bush at War, which recounts the Bush administration in the days following the September 11th, is a valuable first-cut on how Bush and his cabinet make national security decisions. Woodward clearly wrote it for popular consumption and due to the fact that it was ready for publication soon after the fall of Kabul it tells its story by relying almost exclusively through the interviews he conducted with the principals. As a result it should be read as a narrative as seen through the eyes of the Bush cabinet and not as a critical piece of investigative journalism.
That said, it does provide us with an interesting picture of the decision-making process within the Bush administration. What is clear throughout the book is that Bush's understanding of how foreign policy is conducted is extremely limited. He very much relies on his principals to guide the process. As such, the book highlights the intense governmental and bureaucratic politics that took place between he principal actors as each vied for the president's ear, while subsequently trying to diminish the other's role. This was especially highlighted between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld.
The most telling aspect of the book is Bush's insistence on confidence and resolve among the principals and Rice's insistence that any disagreement be worked out when the President was not present. If disagreements arose she would quickly cut off conversation informing them that that issue would be resolved in another meeting. As a result Bush was rarely exposed to multiple viewpoints with regards to Afghan policies.
Another telling aspect is the difficulty that the team had developing policies that dealt with the al-Qaeda threat. Instead policy decisions would drift back toward states. This was prevalent from the very beginning of the decision-making process in which Wolfowitz, at the first post-911 meeting, kept insisting that the U.S. target Iraq. Even the decision to target Afghanistan with large conventional air power seemed to be based more on a desire to show the world they were taking action against al-Qaeda's base of operation, than on eliminating al-Qaeda itself. Most al-Qaeda training camps had been abandoned and so any large-scale use of force against them would be meaningless.
Quickly the focus shifted away from al-Qaeda to the Taliban. Using the justification that the war on terrorism was not just against terrorists (non-state actors), but against those who harbored them (state actors), Bush and team found the Taliban to be an attractive target. There were more hittable targets amongst the Taliban's forces and there were organized armed groups, the Northern Alliance, already fighting against them. The U.S. could use its air power to hit Taliban troop concentrations while the Northern Alliance advanced. This was an extremely successful operation with the Taliban falling by the beginning of December.
However, by focusing on the Taliban (a state), al-Qaeda was able to, for the most part, evacuate the country. It was not until December, a full three months after September 11th , that the offensive at Tora Bora took place. In that time many of al-Qaeda's operatives, including Usama Bin Ladin, had already left. (Interestingly it was Dick Cheney who keeps warning that they should be focusing on al-Qaeda, not the Taliban.)
From the start, the Bush administration has had problems distinguishing between non-state threats and state threats. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush state that his policies were to stop terrorism; however, instead of focusing on the non-state threat, he instead focused on the state threat. This may very well be the result of the political strength Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have within the administration. The most effective way to fight terrorism is not with our armed forces, but with the tools that come out of the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI--all bureaucracies that Rumsfield was very dismissive of during planning meetings leading up to the war in Afghanistan. In order for Defense to have a "dog in the fight", so to speak, the war on terrorism had to include targets Defense could hit, i.e. states.
It is not difficult, therefore, to see how Bush's need for loyalty coupled with his disengagement from policy debates, would lead to the type of policy outcomes we have seen so far. If Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney are able to dominate Powell, Tenet, and Mueller in policy debates, than policy will likely favor military solutions. Because military solutions favor traditional warfare against traditional military targets, the war on terrorism has so far been against states.
To justify these policies, which seem to be the result of bureaucratic and governmental politics rather than any rational realpolitik explanation, Bush has declared that they will ultimately bring about peace, democracy, and a safer world free of bad guys, evil doers and lurking weapons of mass destruction. What we really have, however, are the workings of a dysfunctional decision-making process being driven by political and bureaucratic goals.