Michiko Kakutani on a President in Denial

Michiko Kakutani has a devastating op-ed piece in today's New York Times about the portrait of George W. Bush that emerges from Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial:

In Bob Woodward's highly anticipated new book, "State of Denial," President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It's a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in "Bush at War," his 2002 book, which depicted the president -- in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed -- as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the "vision thing" his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

As this new book's title indicates, Mr. Woodward now sees Mr. Bush as a president who lives in a state of willful denial about the worsening situation in Iraq, a president who insists he won't withdraw troops, even "if Laura and Barney are the only ones who support me." (Barney is Mr. Bush's Scottish terrier.) Mr. Woodward draws an equally scathing portrait of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who comes off as a bully and control freak who is reluctant to assume responsibility for his department's failures, and who has surrounded himself with yes men and created a system that bleached out "strong, forceful military advice." ...

Nothing new there, of course; but Kakutani finds it still worth reading for the additional details -- like this one:

Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they're now "categorizing more things as attacks." Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, "A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you've got a whole fruit bowl of different things -- a banana and an apple and an orange."

Mr. Woodward adds: "I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a 'fruit bowl,' a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.'s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes."

And this one, revealing a conversation between Richard Armitage and Colin Powell, in which Armitage makes the same point Cindy Sheehan has made so many times about staying in Iraq to give meaning to the Americans who died there:

... Armitage ... tell[s] former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he's baffled by President Bush's reluctance to make adjustments in his conduct of the war.

"Has he thought this through?" Mr. Armitage asks. "What the president says in effect is, We've got to press on in honor of the memory of those who have fallen. Another way to say that is we've got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen."

Read the entire Kakutani piece, here.