Bob WoodwardNew York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 480pp, $40.50 cloth (ISBN 0-743-25547-X)When the definitive histories of the current Iraq War are written--expect the first of those combative works in time for beach reading in 2025--historians will be charged with answering their most fundamental question: why did the conflict happen? This question might seem particularly pertinent during a bitter electoral season, though the recent deluge of publications on the subject is unlikely to provide satisfying answers. (This author counted nineteen 2004 books on Iraq displayed in one airport bookstore.) Beliefs formed under the yearlong media blitz before the war become hardened in such a partisan atmosphere, and supporters and opponents of the Iraq War (groups that overwhelmingly mimic preformed opinions of the president) find only validation in the snap rush to judgments of tell-all accounts. Any good historian will tell you it is far too soon to judge the ultimate success of the Wolfowitzian crusade for preventative democracy, leaving amazon.com as the only sure winner in the battle of snap histories.Time may render the ultimate judgment, but the public's appetite for immediate conclusions demands immediate sating. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has sprung to the fore of the current cacophony of analysis with Plan of Attack, a study of the Bush administration's preparations for the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein. His book contributes mightily to our first stab at answering history's fundamental question, as he offers our first good chronology of, if not why, then at least how the war, cast as the second great campaign (the first being the pacification of Afghanistan) in the global War on Terror, came to pass. Woodward has already provided an insider's look at the Afghan campaign with his 2002 best-selling Bush at War, a book celebrated for its powerful window into the Bush administration's decision-making process. That study was an instant success in a nation longing for success following the tragedies of 9/11. Written on a more contentious subject (though twice the length), Plan of Attack is sure to sell far more copies.Readers yearning for a broad treatment of the international debates that presaged the conflict will be sorely disappointed, though breadth was never Woodward's intent. Instead, it is focus. This is an epic morality play about the administration with evidence generously culled from its players, including lengthy interviews with the president himself. What debate that does appear in Woodward's saga--written without footnotes, a frustrating if necessary concession to his profession--comes primarily through after-the-fact confessions from angry insiders whose intentions range from Machiavelli to Macbeth. Cast less as Cassandras than as Pandoras, State Department heads Colin Powell and Richard Armitage most famously appear eager to recast their own roles in the growing Iraqi morass in a new and favourable light. They tried to slow the march to war, not so much to stop it, hoping that now that the most fundamental moment of their public lives has passed, it is better to appear right than influential. Secretary of Defense Dick Rumsfeld, conversely, appears as Richard III, the administration's chief hawk, with General Tommy Franks his proficient if unenthusiastic accomplice. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appears as Lear's jester (when she appears at all), unable to halt her king's tragic end, if that is indeed her goal. And surely the omnipresent Bush is no wavering Hamlet. He knows what he wants, and it is Hussein's head. All that is left is for the details to be worked out by others, in a story Woodward tells in gripping fashion.With this unprecedented access, Woodward has therefore written a fundamentally useful and important work, one that will be pillaged for quotes for as long as the Iraq War is debated. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the contemporary crises. …