Bob Woodward, a past master at the art of marketing bestsellers by reflecting the Democrat zeitgeist, tries his best in his latest offering, War, to put a good face on Biden-Harris incompetence in the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel conflicts. Although Donald Trump was not a government actor during these events, War inserts vignettes purporting, unsuccessfully, to contrast Trump’s unfitness with Biden’s putative steadiness.
Woodward tries but fails to claim that it is Trump’s alleged instability that threatens our fragile world, and not the ineptitude of the senile, perpetually unintelligent Biden. But to his great credit, the dogged reporter in Woodward overcomes the mediocre polemicist. He simply cannot hide Biden’s abject, foolish incompetence in these conflicts, nor can he conceal, try though he might, Trump’s commonsense assessments of the same events. While hoping to help Biden’s political fortunes, his book is a thinly-veiled but strangely ineffective diatribe against the “fascist” former President he awkwardly stumbles to depict.
Before delving into Biden’s actions, we should recall the wise assessment of the well-respected Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration. Biden, Gates wrote in his 2015 book, had been consistently wrong on every national security and foreign policy issue throughout his long tenure in D.C. Moreover, Biden had long been reputed by his colleagues to have been the least intelligent legislator in Congress.
Given Biden’s recently acknowledged mental incompetence, Woodward tries to contextualize it as a recently-developed condition, with only isolated “early markers” in preceding years. But, again, Woodward’s solid factual recitations are far more skillful than his partisan shadings of them.
In June 2023, in the midst of world turmoil, War describes Democrat fundraiser and Microsoft CFO Kevin Scott’s shocked reaction to Biden’s “frighteningly awful” mental wanderings, “like your 87-year-old senile grandfather.” Days later, at a New York fundraiser, its host Michael Gelman called Biden’s performance “painful,” observing, “he never completed a sentence.” While Woodward gamely covers for Biden, the depth of Biden’s incompetence in 2023 is easily inferred to reflect senility throughout the prior thirty months of his Presidency.
What is so frightening about these vignettes, when viewed together with the chaotic international conflicts, is that our world order has been subject to the influence of an elderly man who should be in assisted living quarters, not the White House. And the Woodwards of the media deliberately concealed his scary condition.
Well before Woodward in mid-book slips in this shocking, incontrovertible proof of senility, he tries to portray a steady captain of the ship of state. But viewed through our present informed prism, we should be thankful that our tinderbox world has not yet exploded more widely than it has.
Woodward, to his credit, pulls no punches about the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Stupidly, Biden pulled all troops from the Bagram Air Base before securing either the remaining American citizens and military or protecting billions in advanced weaponry and equipment.
Aiding, abetting, and executing this disaster were the highly political General Mark Milley and Vice Admiral Mark Whitworth, along with the callow, not-ready-for-prime-time National Security Advisor Jake Sulivan and trembling Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, he of the dishonest “Russian disinformation” claim about the Hunter Biden laptop. In the midst of his Afghanistan failures, Biden begged Vladimir Putin to meet with him in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss Russia’s potential invasion of Ukraine, with over 100,000 troops massed at the border. The reader is compelled to ask: how could this possibly go well?
In an earlier April, 2021, phone call, Biden had already suggested to Putin that the price for invading Ukraine would simply be a series of economic costs and the expulsion of diplomats. Woodward’s book suggests that during the June 2021 Geneva summit, Biden spoke only about potential economic costs, as opposed to military deterrence. But what was far more troubling about this summit was Putin’s evaluation of Biden as a senescent, clueless elder: “He recalled some things about his family. They do not seem to be directly related to the subject, but… that was quite endearing…” It was no accident that shortly after this meeting, Putin brazenly issued a 5,000-word diatribe arguing that Ukraine was not an independent country, but part of Russia. Clearly, Biden had emboldened, not deterred, Putin.
Meanwhile, the clueless Sullivan and the frightened Blinken continued to doubt that Putin would invade, while Biden insisted that the discussion with Putin remain “bilateral.” But by October, 2021, Woodward describes the senile Biden as finally awakening to the likelihood of invasion and realizing he needed the support of his European allies, which he had frozen out thus far and failed to prepare.
But if there was any hope for deterring Putin, that was lost when Biden, on December 3, 2021, told the nation that there would be “no U.S. boots on the ground.” Even Sullivan had advised Biden to keep “all options on the table,” a standard diplomatic position. But, fecklessly, Biden said, “Powerful countries don’t bluff” and needed to speak “with clarity.” This “clarity” was akin to an engraved invitation to Putin.
As if he were not clear enough about American weakness, on January 19, 2022, Biden announced that he would accept a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. Yet the partisan media, of which Woodward was a leader, refused to sound the alarm bell. In early 2022, as Woodward describes, Biden went so far as to publicly state that he would not provide American F-16s to the beleaguered Ukraine. Woodward omits to mention that when Presidents Clinton and President Obama had previously forced Ukraine to give up its weapons, they promised security assistance to it.
But rather than rally public support for Ukraine, Biden’s Administration went into overdrive to portray President Trump and his MAGA supporters as being the true threat to democracy. General Milley paid a special visit to Attorney General Merrick Garland to urge the prosecution of those who supported the January 6, 2021 riots, following which Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to prosecute all involved, publicly basing the appointment on Trump’s candidacy. Then Milley approached Bob Woodward in early 2022, urging Woodward on behalf of the media, to “stop” Trump. “He’s a fascist!” the inept Milley forcefully sputtered to the reporter. So, with China threatening Taiwan, Iran threatening the Middle East, and Russia invading Ukraine, the Biden Administration focused on portraying Trump as the true “fascist” danger to our country.
In War, a book that documents Biden’s surrendering Ukraine and its people to Russian devastation, Woodward suggests that it was Trump who was Putin’s patsy, since, after all, he had provided him with Covid testing kits. While Woodward attempts to show that Trump is the real danger to American democracy, he instead proves that it is Biden and his possible successor Harris who truly endanger the world with incompetent foreign policy.
At the same time, Woodward unwittingly dramatizes through this vapid book that what America truly has to fear is a partisan media that refuses to tell the truth to American citizens. Woodward, it is clear, had long known chapter and verse of Biden’s senility and incompetence. Did he tell us when he learned the truth, or did he wait until Biden was forced off stage to monetize his knowledge? This is the key question raised by War.
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
Image: Simon & Schuster
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