Woodward in Newsweek and Newsweek on Woodward

An excerpt of Bob Woodward's Book ‘State of Denial’ appears in Newsweek and places a good deal of the blame for the Iraq debacle on Donald Rumsfeld. I'm not going to paste a lot of quotes, you can go read it yourself, but one really ironic one stands out.

“Get it right this time,” Cheney told Rumsfeld.

This when Rumsfeld was sworn in. Well most would agree at this point he was unable to take Cheney's advice.

In the same issue Newsweek takes a look at Woodward's latest, which is just the latest is a series of critiques of the Bush administration's handling of the war. In The Woodward War Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe look not just at Woodward's book but at how the Bush administration is handling damage control.

With the midterm elections only five weeks away, Bush and his political minions have been striving mightily to direct the attention of voters away from Iraq and toward the threat of a terrorist attack. But Iraq keeps coming back into the headlines. Before the Woodward book began landing in stores late last week, portions of a National Intelligence Estimate began leaking out, suggesting that the war in Iraq was undermining the war on terror. The leaked portions of the NIE, a document representing a consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, disclosed the somewhat unsurprising conclusion that Iraq was turning into a training ground for terrorists. Bush responded by authorizing the declassification of other portions of the NIE, suggesting that if American forces were to quit Iraq, the problem would only grow worse. But simply "staying the course" in Iraq may not satisfy American voters who can see only darkness at the end of the tunnel.

Thomas and Wolffe point out that Woodward took some flack because his first two "insider" books were more fluff than substance. When asked why ‘State of Denial’ had more substance Woodward told Howard Kurtz...

"I found out new things, as is always the case when you replow old ground," Woodward said. "The bulk of them I discovered this year. I wish I'd had some of them for the earlier books, but I didn't."

You can decide for yourself if this holds water or not.