WAR, Bob Woodward

President Trump had secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use as the virus spread rapidly through Russia. “Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump. “I don’t care,” Trump replied. “Fine.” “No, no,” Putin said. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don’t care about me.”

It is, in many ways, an unusual Woodward book to me. It’s the story of a small group of people doing the very best they can for everybody. It’s the story of people trying really hard. The villains of the piece are not front and centre. Woodward is writing about Trump, yes, but he’s mostly writing about Biden and his closest team members, from the standpoint that they were really doing their best to stop everything falling apart. In Woodward’s own words, “a real-time, inside-the-room look at genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest.” The bad guys are largely off-stage. Woodward is trying to write about good guys.

President George W. Bush, who had ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in part because the CIA had said the intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk,” sympathized with Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco. During a phone call after the Afghanistan withdrawal, Bush said to Biden, “Oh boy, I can understand what you’re going through. I got fucked by my intel people, too.”

The book covers the period in Biden’s presidency when Afghanistan, Ukraine and Israel/Gaza all happened pretty much at once.

“When the door was closed in the Oval Office,” Kellogg said, “we’d sit there, and the term I’d use is a BOGSAT which is a bunch of guys sitting at a table bullshitting.”

It’s a reminder that Biden at his peak was a formidable political operator, which a lot of people tended to either forget or dismiss. He was an unusually effective vice president in many ways, precisely because he was written off as a confused and gaffe-prone old man and he and Obama could use that to throw people off or test policies. I personally wonder how many of his outer staff and his party never got that, and simply stopped supporting him when he needed help the most.

On the campaign trail, Biden had gone after Trump’s character and policies relentlessly. From his first day in the White House, Biden barely mentioned Trump’s name, referring to him in public as “my predecessor” and often in private as “that fucking asshole.”

The book goes into granular detail about Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, and taught me a great many things. It could have all gone a lot worse. But it’s bad enough, and it’s not going to get better any time soon. A clever, interesting and sad book.

MBS said he still wanted to enrich the uranium in Saudi Arabia to diversify his energy sector to include nuclear power. “Well, that’s going to be hard to do because people are afraid you’ll create a bomb,” Graham said. “I don’t need uranium to make a bomb,” MBS said. “I’ll just buy one from Pakistan.”

WAR, Bob Woodward (UK) (US+)