(Community Matters) Bob Woodward’s newest tome – Obama’s Wars – releases Monday.
In today’s Mike Allen’s POLITOCO Daily:
OFFICIALS WHO SAT DOWN WITH BOB WOODWARD for “Obama’s Wars,” according to top administration sources: President Obama (on the record, in the Oval Office, for just over an hour); Vice President Biden; Secretary of State Clinton; Defense Secretary Gates; CIA Director Panetta; David Axelrod; Robert Gibbs; Gen. James Jones, the national security adviser; National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough; Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan; countless others.
HOW WOODWARD GOT THE GOODS, by Mike Allen and John F. Harris: “The White House doors swung wide for the world’s most successful non-fiction writer. … ‘Obama’s Wars,’ Bob Woodward’s 16th book-the previous 15 have all been best-sellers and often dominated the news upon release-comes out Monday [with sneak peaks, excerpted below, in NYT and WP today]. … Woodward surprised top defense and intelligence officials by coming in for interviews armed with classified maps, in some cases labeled with code names for clandestine operations. … Part of Woodward’s magic comes from his long relationships after more than 30 years as Washington’s most famous reporter. Woodward has known Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the war in Afghanistan, since he was a major. He has known the White House national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, since he was a colonel.
“In addition to White House insiders, there are the less obvious sources: diplomats posted to Washington from other countries (the Pakistani embassy seems to be a big source), and less-heralded officials in the military (including retired general and senior Defense Department civilians), State Department and intelligence bureaucracies. … Woodward ‘takes that information and reads it back to the White House, and they decide to play ball with him,’ an aide said. Another administration official explained: ‘He sequences his interviews in a way that he can impress the higher-ups with what he knows already. Then it’s harder not to talk.’ … Instead of thinking, ‘I’m talking to Bob Woodward: I’d better be careful,’ sources tend to think, ‘I’m talking to Bob Woodward. I’d better tell him something good.’ This effect is said to be especially vivid when he invites sources into his Georgetown dining room.”
N.Y. Times A12, “Book Says Afghanistan Divided White House,” by Peter Baker with Julie Bosman in New York, and Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, Brian Knowlton and Thom Shanker in Washington: “Some of the critical players in President Obama’s national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf … Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is quoted saying of the strategy that ‘it can’t work.’ … Although the internal divisions described have become public, the book suggests that they were even more intense and disparate than previously known and offers new details. Mr. Biden called Mr. Holbrooke ‘the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.’ … Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates worried that General Jones would be succeeded by his deputy, Thomas E. Donilon, who would be a ‘disaster.’ Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was overall commander for the Middle East until becoming the Afghanistan commander this summer, told a senior aide that he disliked talking with David M. Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, because he was ‘a complete spin doctor.’ General Petraeus was effectively banned by the administration from the Sunday talk shows but worked private channels with Congress and the news media.
“And the book recounts incidents in which Adm. Dennis C. Blair, then the national intelligence director, fought with Rahm Emanuel … and John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser. During a daily intelligence briefing in May 2009, Mr. Blair warned the president that radicals with American and European passports were being trained in Pakistan to attack their homelands. Mr. Emanuel afterward chastised him, saying, ‘You’re just trying to put this on us so it’s not your fault.’ … Even after [Obama] agreed to send another 30,000 troops last winter, the Pentagon asked for another 4,500 ‘enablers’ to support them. The president lost his poise, according to the book. ‘I’m done doing this!’ he erupted. To ensure that the Pentagon did not reinterpret his decision, Mr. Obama dictated a six-page, single-space ‘terms sheet’ explicitly laying out his troop order and its objectives, a document included in the book’s appendix. Mr. Obama’s struggle with the decision comes through in a conversation with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who asked if his deadline to begin withdrawal in July 2011 was firm. ‘I have to say that,’ Mr. Obama replied. ‘I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.'”
WashPost, A1 banner in final edition (missing from early runs) — “Book details internal struggle over Afghan plan — OBAMA FRUSTRATED BY MILITARY: Woodward account centers on war strategy review,” by Steve Luxenberg: “President Obama urgently looked for a way out of the war in Afghanistan last year, repeatedly pressing his top military advisers for an exit plan that they never gave him, according to secret meeting notes and documents cited in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward. … ‘I’m not doing 10 years,’ he told Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a meeting on Oct. 26, 2009. ‘I’m not doing long-term nation-building. I am not spending a trillion dollars.’ Woodward’s book portrays Obama and the White House as barraged by warnings about the threat of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and confronted with the difficulty in preventing them. During an interview with Woodward in July, the president said, ‘We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.’ … Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. …
“National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama’s political aides as ‘the water bugs,’ the ‘Politburo,’ the ‘Mafia,’ or the ‘campaign set.’ … During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was ‘[expletive] with the wrong guy.’ … Suspicion lingered among some from the 2008 presidential campaign as well. When Obama floated the idea of naming Clinton to a high-profile post, Axelrod asked him, ‘How could you trust Hillary?’… A new capability developed by the National Security Agency has dramatically increased the speed at which intercepted communications can be turned around into useful information for intelligence analysts and covert operators. ‘They talk, we listen. They move, we observe. Given the opportunity, we react operationally,’ then-Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained to Obama at a briefing two days after he was elected president. … Afghan President Hamid Karzai was diagnosed as manic depressive, according to U.S. intelligence reports. ‘He’s on his meds, he’s off his meds,’ Woodward quotes U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry as saying.”
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