Home
.-') _ .-') _
( OO ) ) ( OO ) )
.-----. ,--./ ,--,' ,--./ ,--,'
' .--./ | \ | |\ | \ | |\
| |('-. | \| | )| \| | )
/_) |OO )| . |/ | . |/
|| |`-'| | |\ | | |\ |
(_' '--'\ | | \ | | | \ |
`-----' `--' `--' `--' `--'
lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Bob Woodward issues a stark warning on Trump weeks from Election Day
Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
Updated:
9:40 PM EDT, Tue October 15, 2024
Source: CNN
The arrival of a new has a well-established choreography; enterprising
reporters get hold of copies of the heavily embargoed volume a week or
so ahead of its publication date and mine it for the news it contains.
Both and , where Woodward retains the honorific title of associate
editor, covered the news in the latest book, “War,” last week. And
news there was: At the height of the pandemic, President sent Russian
President Vladimir Putin a secret shipment of Covid-19 testing
equipment, and since he has left office, Trump has called Putin as many
as seven times.
Ahead of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President blamed former
President Barack Obama for not doing more to counter the Russian leader
when he invaded Crimea in 2014, telling a friend, “That’s why we
are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously.”
Putin had a heated call with Biden in the run-up to Russia’s February
2022 invasion of Ukraine, in which the Russian president threatened a
nuclear war. Later, Biden’s national security team assessed there was
a 50% chance Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon during the
Ukraine conflict. It is worth noting that back in March, CNN’s Jim
Sciutto had similar about Putin’s possible use of a tactical nuclear
weapon in Ukraine in late 2022.
As has been the case for previous Woodward books, those who don’t
come out well from his reporting publicly dismiss it. The Trump
campaign said: “None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are
true.”
The deluge of publicity that precedes the publication of Woodward’s
book ensures that the book shoots to the top of the bestseller lists
before Woodward does any media himself. Even before “War” goes on
sale Tuesday, it’s already No. 5 on Amazon’s bestseller list, so it
could also be on the way to being Woodward’s 16th No. 1 New York
Times bestseller, an astonishing record of success.
Woodward has a penchant for one-word titles for his books about Trump:
“Peril,” “Rage” and “Fear.” He has also written extensively
about the post-9/11 wars in books such as “Bush at War” and
“Obama’s Wars.” So how does “War” stack up against those
books, and what are its big themes?
At the heart of “War,” Woodward reports about how Biden’s
national security team handled three wars: in Afghanistan, the Ukraine
conflict, and the war in Gaza, now in its second year, which has
embroiled the Middle East in a widening conflict.
Like Woodward’s several other books about war, the front lines of the
conflicts he covers are not on the battlefields but in the Oval Office
and the White House Situation Room. I reviewed showing that Robert
Woodward (his legal name) visited the White House more than two dozen
times from December 2022 to April 2024, a period that “War” covers
in detail.
Woodward rarely strays far from this apex of American power. As a
result, “War” is not suffused with the sound of gunfire, but the
ringing of cell phones as senior Biden officials get on secure
conference calls.
Woodward notes that neither Biden nor Trump spoke to him for this book,
but he still got great access. It’s clear from a close reading of
“War” that almost every top national security official in the Biden
administration spoke with him. Those officials did so surely because
they understood that if they didn’t talk to Woodward, their peers
certainly would. So, if they wanted to get their version of history
told, it only made sense to cooperate with the legendary reporter, who,
at age 81, has more energy and puts in more shoe leather than reporters
half his age.
Typically, in Woodward’s books, he lets his reporting speak for
itself and doesn’t make sweeping pronouncements that tell the reader
about his own conclusions, but “War” is different. Woodward, who
has covered every president since Nixon, writes that Trump is “not
only the wrong man for the presidency, he is also unfit to lead the
country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal
president. … Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in
American history.” Ouch!
By contrast, the final sentence of “War” asserts, “Based on the
evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be
largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful
leadership.”
Biden’s Afghan withdrawal fiasco
Yet, that conclusion of steady and purposeful leadership is quite at
odds with the fiasco of the from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021,
which handed the country back to the Taliban, and during which a
suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and some 170 Afghans.
This was an own goal scored by Biden’s decision to go , who told him
the withdrawal of the small contingent of 2,500 US troops then in
Afghanistan would lead to the collapse of the Afghan military.
Collapse it did, and now the Taliban rule over Afghanistan with an
enabled by many billions of dollars of military equipment that the US
left behind. The Taliban are also accommodating some 20 terrorist
organizations, .
The Afghanistan withdrawal also signaled to Putin that the US was
withdrawing from the world in general, which seems to have accelerated
his plans to invade Ukraine. Woodward’s reporting underlines this
point. He writes that top generals at the Pentagon learned that a few
weeks after the Afghanistan withdrawal, “new pieces of intelligence
were coming in that suggested Russia was planning a large-scale
military attack on Ukraine.”
Biden then dispatched CIA Director Bill Burns, who had dealt with Putin
during his stint as US ambassador to Russia, to warn the Russian leader
that the US knew he was planning an invasion of Ukraine and to try to
dissuade him. Along with Burns on the trip to Russia was the National
Security Council director for Russia, Eric Green. According to
Woodward, Green “picked up a sense that the Russians were feeling
kind of full of themselves after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Green told Woodward, “I think it reinforced Putin’s conception
about how easy it would be. … Here’s a military force that has been
supported by the US for decades at that stage. They just collapsed. The
Americans didn’t back them up.”
Biden gets it right on Ukraine
By contrast, the Biden team did show real leadership when it tried to
warn the world of Putin’s impending invasion of Ukraine and then,
when it happened, steadily supplied the Ukrainians with weapons and
substantial aid so that they have held off the Russians for more than
two and a half years. This has all been achieved without any American
boots on the ground, a key Biden goal for the war.
In the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden and his team warned in
private discussions with the Ukrainians and NATO allies that, based on
their intelligence, Putin was close to invading. They also innovated by
making this intelligence public. Not surprisingly, this was met with
some initial resistance from the US intelligence community, yet it was
smart policy. After all, secrecy serves policy; it is not a policy goal
in and of itself.
On December 3, 2021, The Washington Post headlined, “Russia planning
a massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops,
U.S. intelligence warns.” Although this declassification of
intelligence didn’t, in the end, stop Putin from invading Ukraine, it
likely made NATO allies and the Ukrainians better prepared for how to
respond once the invasion began.
If the Afghanistan withdrawal was a spectacular own goal scored by
Biden himself since he was the leading proponent of the policy, the
Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine invasion was about as
good as it gets. Biden wanted to support the Ukrainians substantially
but did not want to trigger World War III inadvertently. That policy
has largely been a success. When US intelligence found that Putin was
seriously contemplating using a tactical nuclear weapon, the Biden
administration “mobilized every communication line, calling the
Chinese, the Indians, the Israelis, the Turks — countries friendly
with Russia” to get them to tell Putin to stand down. He did.
One of Putin’s key goals when he invaded Ukraine was to ensure the
country never joined NATO. Instead, because of the invasion, Putin made
NATO Great Again. Multiple NATO countries started ramping up their own
spending on defense, and the alliance added two new members, the
formerly neutral states of and , Russia’s neighbor.
While the war has stalemated now with a slight advantage to the
Russians, who are advancing slowly in eastern Ukraine, in August, the
Ukrainians seized hundreds of square miles of territory of Russia
itself, which they have retained. No matter how much Putin’s
propagandists proclaim that victory is close, the Russians are
estimated to have already suffered 600,000 dead and wounded, according
to a Pentagon briefing last week.
The Middle East regional war Biden tried to avoid
Hamas attacked Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis, the Biden team has
not prevented an escalating regional conflict. Instead of showing
purposeful leadership, the Biden administration has repeatedly handed
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check, which he has
used to carry out large-scale attacks not only in Gaza but also in the
West Bank and Lebanon, as well as more targeted operations in Syria and
Yemen.
The war is Gaza has claimed the lives of 42,000 people, according to
the Gaza Health Ministry, while the death toll in Lebanon is more than
1,500 since Israel launched a ground operation there in recent weeks,
and a million Lebanese have fled their homes, .
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have effectively shut down shipping
through the using Iran-supplied missiles and drones and have also fired
them at Israel. In the past six months, Iran has launched two massive
attacks on Israel using ballistic missiles and drones, widening the war
to the regional conflict that the Biden administration was strenuously
seeking to avoid when Hamas launched its attacks in Israel on October
7, 2023.
The possibility of a ceasefire with Hamas and the return of the
hostages held by the terrorist group at this point since the leader of
Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and Netanyahu are unwilling to compromise,
and both seem to believe that the continuation of the war benefits
their interests.
On Sunday, the Israeli Cabinet met to decide how to respond to the most
recent Iranian missile strike on Israel two weeks ago. Biden has urged
the Israelis not to strike Iranian nuclear sites. Let’s see whether
they listen. The record so far has not been encouraging.
Biden’s unwavering support for Netanyahu even has a name — “the
bear hug”— and while the president has occasionally protested
publicly about the level of casualties in Gaza, the de facto policy is
strong support for Israel; for instance, the Biden administration is
going forward with the sale of $18 billion of F-15 fighter jets to the
country.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration tried without success to
get Netanyahu not to attack the densely populated Gazan city of Rafah,
where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians were sheltering, many of
them evicted from their homes earlier in the conflict.
Biden called Netanyahu on February 15, 2024, telling him, “We already
said we are not going to support an operation absent a plan to get
civilians out of harm’s way.” Netanyahu ignored this warning and
went ahead with the attack on Rafah. Woodward’s assessment of US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s efforts to rein in Netanyahu
during this period is damning and direct: “It was obvious Blinken had
no influence.”
It’s mystifying why the Biden administration hasn’t used more of
its considerable leverage over Netanyahu; after all, in the past year,
the US has approved $17.9 billion for security assistance to Israel,
according to a report by Brown University released last week; the most
aid in any year that the US has ever sent to Israel. The Biden
administration has halted the shipment of massive 2,000-pound bombs to
Israel, but otherwise, the large flow of American weapons to the Jewish
state continues.
Vice President Kamala Harris
Though Vice President Kamala Harris adorns the cover of “War” —
likely a marketing decision given her presidential run — she does not
play a prominent role in the book compared with Blinken, Secretary of
Defense Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Yet, when Harris appears in the book, she does give sound advice. When
Biden asked her what her view was in mid-April after Iran had fired
some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, almost all of which were then
shot down by Israel, the US and other allies, Harris said simply,
“Tell Bibi to take the win.”
Harris also has one of the funnier lines in the book, saying Biden
likes her company because “he knows that I’m the only person around
who knows how to properly pronounce the word motherfucker.” Indeed,
we learn from Woodward that “Joe from Scranton” sure does use the
F-word a lot, particularly when it comes to Netanyahu, who Biden
variously describes as one of “the biggest fucking assholes in the
world,” “a bad fucking guy” and “a fucking liar.” And for
good measure, Biden yells at Netanyahu, “Bibi, what the fuck?”
after the Israelis living in a densely populated area of the capital of
Lebanon, also killing at least three civilians.
“War” is a deeply reported account of the wars on the Biden
administration’s watch. At the same time, its overall assessment that
the Biden team showed purposeful leadership regarding these conflicts
isn’t supported by the facts of the Afghan withdrawal, the present
conflagration in the Middle East, and even Woodward’s own reporting.
However, regarding Ukraine, the Biden administration has operated very
deftly, keeping NATO together and expanding the alliance while avoiding
any direct American involvement in the war that might have triggered an
escalatory response from the Russians. Certainly, this is a real
achievement that Biden can savor when he enjoys his well-earned
retirement back in Delaware.
It is anyone’s guess what Trump might do about Ukraine if he were to
win the presidency, given the former president’s odd bromance with
Putin, which even top aides such as Trump’s director of national
Intelligence, Dan Coats, cannot explain. Coats told Woodward, “It’s
still a mystery to me how he deals with Putin and what he says to
Putin. … It’s an enigma, and it hasn’t been broken yet.”
Trump has claimed he could quickly settle the Ukraine conflict, but
since the Russians and Ukrainians have been at war for a decade since
Putin first seized Crimea in 2014, this seems like wishful thinking.
DIR <- back to index