Product Description

Award-winning journalist Bob Woodward has spent over thirty years in Washington's corridors of power. In All the President's Men it was he, together with Carl Bernstein, who exposed the Watergate scandal and he has been giving us a privileged front-row seat to White-House intrigue and decision-making ever since. With PLAN OF ATTACK he brings his investigative skills to bear on the administration of George W. Bush, and the build-up to war in Iraq. What emerges is a fascinating and intimate portrait of the leading powers in Bush's war council and their allies overseas as they prepare their pre-emptive attack and change the course of history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55558 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 influence than most would have thought possible.

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 re-election 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, Amazon.com

About the Author
Bob Woodward is Assistant Managing Editor at THE WASHINGTON POST. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate reporting is said to have set the standard for modern investigative reporting. Over the last 22 years he has authored or co-authored seven No.1 internationally bestselling books.

Customer Reviews

No smoke without fire
After all the hype and controversy, this book is a little disappointing. If you want to know all about the how of the Iraq war, then it should satisfy you. It does indeed live up to its title and tells us more than most of us need to know about the military planning of a modern war by a superpower in a distant country.

What many people are interested in though, is the why of the Iraq war. Bob Woodward doesn't supply us with a lot of information about this, possibly because this would involve an investigation in which he would get a lot less help from officialdom. To be fair, he does ask some pointed questions and then leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions without openly suggesting what they should think. This is quite skilful on his part. After all, the amazing access he managed to obtain from the key players in the Administration means you are getting much of the information from the horse's mouth. But you end up questioning that level of cooperation. Why were Bush and co. so keen to accord lengthy interviews on such a sensitive subject? Is it just another part of the smokescreen laid down to hoodwink public opinion?

The most valuable contribution of the book is that it clearly demonstrates, without harping on the fact, that Bush was planning the removal of Saddam even before 9-11 or having any motive remotely connected with international terrorism. The tragedy seems to have been that the simple conception of the possibility of a war led to its planning, and that this planning made the war an inevitability after a while. In this sense, there was never going to be a shred of hope for diplomacy - it was just a farce played out for public opinion. Woodward's book does lay all this bare and is required reading if you want to be able to make even a partially informed opinion on the Iraq war. But it does seem to play down the excitement level of what it is tacitly implying and doesn't even begin to criticize those whose motives and actions look extremely murky.

A Cyclopean rush to Baghdad
At the beginning of 2002 the Bush administration, as a result of the 9/11 attacks, had made a commitment to oust the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, responsible in their eyes for harbouring Osama bin-Laden's al Qaeda network, with unprecedented support both at home and overseas.
Bob Woodward's enthralling new book details, possibly in too exhaustive detail, how the Bush administration then took the decision to concentrate almost solely on the ousting of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, in the process losing most of the aforementioned support. All the main protagonists (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell etc) were interviewed several times about the planning and decision making processes that took place over the course of 2002 up until the actual invasion in March 2003. Thankfully Woodward doesn't install his own opinions or prejudices on the right or wrongs of their decisions, and therefore we are left with a well balanced book, with the main protagonists able to justify themselves over the course of their interviews.
Whether you believe the war in Iraq was justified or not, this book probably won't change your mind now, however I believe that it will at least give you an appreciation of the opposing view. Opponents of the war will have to concede that the United Nations was particularly ineffectual, with the author detailing how the French delayed resolution 1441 over the insertion of the word 'or' instead of the word 'and', meaning that Iraq would need to fail two tests instead of one to be in violation of the resolution.
Those in favour of the war would likewise have to concede that the administration was focused too squarely on Iraq from early on, thereby hindering its operation in Afghanistan, when arguably North Korea, Iran and the Israel/Palestine problem were more threatening to long-term security.
One of the main things I noticed is that, despite the months of planning and the endless war-game scenarios carried out, no-one foresaw what actually happened in Iraq, namely the dissolving away of the Iraqi regime and the morphing of the Iraqi military into Iraqi insurgency. Also no viable exit strategy was ever finalised, leaving the likelihood that U.S. forces will be in Iraq for years to come.
As mentioned earlier this book succeeds admirably in giving us the 'how', I'm not sure it quite succeeds on the 'why', though judging from some of the interviews it was something that was never really discussed within the administration, all of them convinced (except Powell) that it was the right way to go.
Whether they were right or not, well only History will tell us.

Riveting! Buy this book and reflect deeply
This is an astonishing account of the decision processes leading to war.Expertly written in a style which would make most novelists envious,Woodward produces his best writing from the time of All the President'sMen. Key points include the strong sense that Dubya is a much smarter guythan many of his detractors would claim; the process whereby Colin Powellwas often out of the loop on key decisions; the stand-up row betweenCondoleeza Rice and her top Pentagon aide Buck Tarbrush regarding whetherWMD could be found in Iraq; and the suggestion that Dick Cheney is reallythe power behind the throne. Awesome account - buy it today!!!