The 2003 American invasion of Iraq was contentious, not just in the arena of global public opinion, but within the tight-lipped world of the George W. Bush White House. As Bob Woodward reveals in Plan of Attack, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were part of a group leading the charge to war while Secretary of State Colin Powell, General Tommy Franks, and others actively questioned the plan to invade a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks while war in Afghanistan was still being waged. Woodward gained extensive access to dozens of key figures and enjoyed hours of direct contact with the President himself (more time, seemingly, than former Bush administration officials Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill claim to have had). As a result, he's able to cite the kind of gossip you won't find in a White House press release: Franks calls Pentagon official Douglas Feith "the f*cking stupidest guy on the face of the earth," Powell shares his alarm over how the cautious Cheney of the first Bush administration had transformed into a zealot, and Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar seems to enjoy significantly more entrée and influence than most anyone would have thought. Bush is shown as a man intent on toppling Saddam Hussein in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and never really wavering in his decision despite offering hints that non-military solutions could be achieved. Light is also shed on CIA director George Tenet, who insists that the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk" only to later admit that his intelligence was flawed when months of post-war searches turned up nothing. But the book's most interesting character is Powell. A former soldier himself, who finds himself increasingly at odds with the agenda of the administration, Powell rejects evidence on WMDs that he sees as spurious but ultimately endorses the invasion effort, apparently out of duty. Upon its publication, the Bush administration roundly denied many of the accounts in the book that demonstrated conflict within their circles, poor judgment, or lousy planning, but the Bush/Cheney reelection campaign nonetheless listed Plan of Attack as recommended reading. And it is. It shows alarming problems in the way the war was conceived and planned, but it also demonstrates the tremendous conviction and dedication of the people who decided to carry it out. --John Moe

From Publishers Weekly
Based on exhaustive research and remarkable access to the White House, including two sessions with President Bush and more than 75 interviews with administration officials, veteran Washington Post assistant managing editor Woodward delivers an engrossing blow-by-blow of the run-up to war in Iraq. In November 2001, just months after September 11, Woodward reports, Bush pulled aside defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and asked him to secretly begin updating war plans for Iraq. Sixteen months later, in March 2003, after an intense war-planning effort, a tense political fight at home and a carefully crafted "if-you-don’t-we-will" diplomatic strategy with the U.N., the American invasion began. Woodward has penned a forceful, often disturbing narrative that captures the deep personality and policy clashes within the Bush administration. Bush, along with Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz, are portrayed as believing in a sweeping mission to export democracy and to have America be viewed as strong and willing to walk the walk. They are counterbalanced by Colin Powell, who emerges here as a reluctant warrior, a pragmatic voice—eventually muted—cautioning the president against a rush to war. The most stunning aspect of the story, however, is the glaring intelligence failure of George Tenet’s CIA, from bad WMD information to what Woodward reports as the outright manipulation of questionable intelligence to make the case for war. With this book, Woodward, the author of an astonishing nine number-one bestsellers, has delivered his most important and impressive work in years. Ultimately, this first-class work of contemporary history will be remembered for shedding needed light on the Iraq War, whatever its final outcome. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The United States may be a vast and democratic republic, but at the heart of our government is a small coterie of officials, friends and relatives around the president. It is our version of a royal court, and the politics of the court -- as opposed to the politics of the country -- would be instantly recognizable to the denizens of Versailles in the time of Louis XIV.Nobody understands this aspect of American public life like The Washington Post's Bob Woodward -- the fly on the wall of White Houses going back to the Nixon years. Like the Duc de Saint-Simon, chronicler of life at Versailles and author of the eye-opening Mémoires, Woodward is a masterful recorder of the fascinating doings of our republican court.In Plan of Attack, the court is divided. Prince Cheney and the Duc de Rumsfeld are the chieftains of the war party; Grand Marshal Powell takes every opportunity to warn the king that it is easier to start a war than to build a stable peace. "It is the Pottery Barn rule," warns the Marshal. (In Washington as in Versailles, epigrams count.) "You break it [Iraq], you own it." (Pottery Barn, as it turns out, has no such rule and took vigorous exception to this characterization.) The politics of courts are always mysterious, but it appears that Condoleezza Rice -- whose access to the president is matched only by her apparent reticence around Woodward -- used the concept of "coercive diplomacy" to bridge the gap between the two factions: The United States would attempt to remove Saddam Hussein by diplomatic means; our diplomacy would include the threat of force -- and if diplomacy failed, force would be used.Powell went to work on the diplomatic track; Rumsfeld developed the plans for war and for the postwar period when the Pottery Barn rule would apply. The president, determined from the beginning to implement the Clinton-era goal of regime change in Iraq, made the decision to go to war in the first week of January 2003, after the diplomatic track through the Security Council appeared to have finally failed.Had the postwar reconstruction of Iraq proved to be anything like the "cakewalk" that the overthrow of Saddam turned out to be, Plan of Attack would read like a hymn of praise to the decisive leadership of George W. Bush.As it is, the reader is left with questions that Plan of Attack does not address. Why did so many Middle East hands -- including the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, one of the great courtiers of our time -- think that Saddam's overthrow was so important? What was the connection in the president's mind -- alluded to but never closely examined here -- between the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the renewal of the Middle East peace process? What was the hierarchy of American interests there? How did the region -- and American interests -- change after Sept. 11? What in the judgment of the administration's key players was the state of the Middle East? What is President Bush's strategic plan in the war on terror? What does Rumsfeld think the plan should be? What about Rice? Powell? Cheney? The answers to questions like these are necessary to understand why the various members of the administration thought and acted as they did -- but Plan of Attack does not show any sign of Woodward having discussed any such questions with his sources.Woodward casts interesting light on what in hindsight has clearly emerged as the greatest political blunder of the administration's war strategy so far -- pinning so much of the public case for war on what increasingly seem to be vastly overblown estimates of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction programs (WMD) under Saddam. Here the inquest exculpates the president and the White House war hawks from cooking the evidence; it is CIA director George Tenet who overwhelms Bush's questions about WMD by calling the case for WMD "a slam dunk." It is not quite clear whether WMD became the central pillar of the public case for war because the administration thought that this threat was the most politically persuasive or because this threat was, in fact, the driving force in the administration's own thinking.Plan of Attack is less successful when it comes to the second great blunder of the war: the failure of the occupation. Woodward gives us the barest outline. Rumsfeld wanted responsibility for the occupation placed in the Department of Defense. Powell concurred; historically, military occupations have been run by the military. But clearly the plans for occupation were far more slipshod than the military plans for the conquest. To some degree that was inevitable; occupation is a far more complex process than conquest, and planners face many more unknowns.Plan of Attack vividly demonstrates that Rumsfeld is an inspired leader when it comes to military planning. He was ruthless at dissecting military proposals for the war, asking questions that pointed up shaky assumptions and logical fallacies, and demanding over and over again that military planners go back to the drawing board and produce something better.What happened to this Rumsfeldian ruthlessness when it came to the preparation for the political and security challenges of an Iraqi occupation? Were the assumptions behind the planning -- for example, confidence in the political abilities of Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial head of the Iraqi National Congress -- subjected to the scalding skepticism heaped on the military's pet war-fighting assumptions? Were assumptions about Iraq's purported eagerness for democracy critically examined? Were multiple scenarios rigorously and cold-bloodedly analyzed, and alternatives fully thought through? Again, Woodward doesn't ask. Historians will want to know a great deal more about how this process worked. Voters will also be curious.Had Woodward cast a wider net, he would have had a richer book and one with a longer shelf life. Still, one is grateful. Bob Woodward is the most accomplished political reporter of his generation, and Plan of Attack gives us the best glimpse of life in our republican court that we are likely to have until the principals retire to their private estates and avenge themselves on their rivals by writing memoirs. Reviewed by Walter Russell MeadCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
After hundreds of hours of interviews with 75 key participants in the decision to go to war with Iraq, Bob Woodward distilled their narratives to provide a comprehensive account of that process. Boyd Gaines offers a clear rendition of the narrative, with minimal character vocalization, and no hint of the tension and emotion of the interviews or their subjects. A choppy abridgment removes much coherence from the text, and possibly adds the political bias of the editor to Woodward's accurate and objective account. In a book dealing with such highly charged content, the quality, coherence, and objectivity of the abridgment take on an importance far greater than they would in fiction. R.P.L. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times A remarkable book, one that fulfills the too often ephemeral promise of what has come to be called investigative journalism....The American people seldom have been given this clear a window on their government's most sensitive deliberations.

David Cook, The Christian Science Monitor Richly detailed, awesomely sourced...a granular record of the nation's march to war with Iraq, gleaned from interviews, memos, phone records, and PowerPoint presentations.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Engrossing...Woodward uses myriad details to chart the Bush administration's march to war against Iraq. His often harrowing narrative not only illuminates the fateful interplay of personality and policy...but underscores the role that fuzzy intelligence, Pentagon timetables and aggressive ideas about the military and foreign policy had in creating momentum for war.

Review
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Instantly essential...By far the most intimate glimpse we have been granted of the Bush White House, and the administration's defining moment.

Book Description
The #1 National Bestseller Plan of Attack delivers an astonishingly intimate portrait of President George W. Bush, his war council and allies as they launch a preemptive attack on Iraq, toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying the country. Woodward's fly-on-the-wall account reveals the secret meetings, key decisions, conflicts and raw emotions of war as they are rarely seen in contemporary history.

Download Description
"Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over two years, examining the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam. Based on interviews with 75 key participants and more than three and a half hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush, Plan of Attack is part presidential history charting the decisions made during 16 critical months; part military history revealing precise details and the evolution of the Top Secret war planning under the restricted codeword Polo Step; and part a harrowing spy story as the CIA dispatches a covert paramilitary team into northern Iraq six months before the start of the war. This team recruited 87 Iraqi spies designated with the cryptonym DB/ROCKSTARS, one of whom turned over the personnel files of all 6,000 men in Saddam Hussein's personal security organization. What emerges are astonishingly intimate portraits: President Bush in war cabinet meetings in the White House Situation Room and the Oval Office, and in private conversation; Dick Cheney, the focused and driven vice president; Colin Powell, the conflicted and cautious secretary of state; Donald Rumsfeld, the controlling war technocrat; George Tenet, the activist CIA director; Tommy Franks, the profane and demanding general; Condoleezza Rice, the ever-present referee and national security adviser; Karl Rove, the hands-on political strategist; other key members of the White House staff and congressional leadership; and foreign leaders ranging from British Prime Minister Blair to Russian President Putin. Plan of Attack provides new details on the intelligence assessments of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the planning for the war's aftermath."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washinton decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over two years, examining the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam." "Based on interviews with 75 key participants and more than three and a half hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush, Plan of Attack is part presidential history charting the decisions made during 16 critical months; part military history revealing precise details and the evolution of the Top Secret war planning under the restricted code word Polo Step; and part a harrowing spy story as the CIA dispatches a covert paramilitary team into northern Iraq six months before the start of the war. This team recruited 87 Iraqi spies designated with the cryptonym DB/ROCKSTARS, one of whom turned over the personnel files of all 6,000 men in Saddam Hussein's personal security organization." What emerges are astonishingly intimate portraits: President Bush in war cabinet meetings in the White House Situation Room and the Oval Office, and in private conversation; Dick Cheney, the focused and driven vice president; Colin Powell, the conflicted and cautious secretary of state; Donald Rumsfeld, the controlling war technocrat; George Tenet, the activist CIA director; Tommy Franks, the profane and demanding general; Condoleezza Rice, the ever-present referee and national security adviser; Karl Rove, the hands-on political strategist; other key members of the White House staff and congressional leadership; and foreign leaders ranging from British Prime Minister Blair to Russian President Putin. Plan of Attack provides new details on the intelligence assessments of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the planning for the war's aftermath.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

In his engrossing new book, Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward uses myriad details to chart the Bush administration's march to war against Iraq. His often harrowing narrative not only illuminates the fateful interplay of personality and policy among administration hawks and doves, but it also underscores the role that fuzzy intelligence, Pentagon timetables and aggressive ideas about military and foreign policy had in creating momentum for war. — Michiko Kakutani

Ted Widmer - The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Plan of Attack offers by far the most intimate glimpse we have been granted of the Bush White House, and, better still, a glimpse of the administration's defining moment: its war of choice against Saddam Hussein … Plan of Attack is, as its title suggests, a more combative book than anything Bob Woodward has written in a long time, and reminds us of the investigative passion that got him going in the first place. He could not have chosen a better moment for his comeback.

Walter Russell Mead - The Washington Post

Bob Woodward is the most accomplished political reporter of his generation, and Plan of Attack gives us the best glimpse of life in our republican court that we are likely to have until the principals retire to their private estates and avenge themselves on their rivals by writing memoirs.

Publishers Weekly

While researching this book, Woodward (All the President's Men; Bush at War) interviewed more than 75 individuals and spent three and a half hours over the course of two days with George W. Bush himself. The resulting account of the decisions made before and following the start of the Iraq war has raised hackles on both sides of the political spectrum. While many conservatives see it as a smear on the administration, many liberals feel Woodward has handled the situation with kid gloves (a criticism that is only reinforced by the fact that Plan of Attack is at the top of the President's reading list on his Web site). Reading in first person as Woodward, veteran actor and audiobook reader Gaines does a superb job of conveying this important information in a mature yet charged manner. His voice is smooth and measured, and his timing, modulation and emphasis are perfectly suited to both the material and to Woodward's narrative voice. Because it is done so well, Gaines's delivery becomes transparent-a window through which we can view Woodward's text without distraction. Simultaneous release with the S&S hardcover. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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