Obama's Wars

Usually I am content to just post my star rating for the books I read and the movies I see, but I feel compelled to make some additional commentary on this one.

I think the rating I gave this book (3 Stars) is probably the lowest one I've given any book since I started posting ratings on here. While some (i.e. Weir) would argue that it means my rating system is too generous, I would argue that it's because I really try to limit myself to books that are really good (or at least ones that I'm really likely to enjoy). I don't mind occasionally throwing away 2 hours on a crappy movie, but giving 10-12 hours of your life to a book that sucks is not something I enjoy doing. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say that this book sucked, it was extraordinarily disappointing.

This is the 5th Woodward book I've read, although 2 of them I haven't read all the way through (I'm still in the middle of The Agenda and I only read about half of All the President's Men while researching for a paper on Watergate in high school). Until now, I'd always enjoyed them thoroughly. But he took a big step backwards here. To me I think it seems obvious that he really wanted to put out the first "big" book about the Obama presidency and it seems really rushed as a result. It seems like he thought "hmm, I've still got lots of military contacts from writing the Bush books and it'll take me too long to get new ones in the Fed and with various economic advisors so I'm just going to completely ignore that aspect." That's fair enough, but the problem is that there's just not enough there to fill up a 400 page book. You get a very good first 50 pages where he discusses the transition from Bush to Obama and a very good last 50 pages when they kind of open things up and talk about how Obama reacted to various situations as they occurred (e.g. the underwear bomber, the McChrystal Rolling Stones interview). But in between you get 300 pages of what is essentially recaps of minutes from various strategy meetings where Obama, the cabinet, and the generals try to agree on whether or not to send more troops into Afghanistan. Was that an important decision that is worthy of being put into print? Of course; but it can easily be accomplished in 50 or (at most) 100 pages. To say that it's padded is the understatement of the year. The central question that everyone is deciding on is "are we doing a full counter-insurgency, just a pure counter-terrorism, or trying some combination?" That question, in some form, is asked and answered no less than 30 times in the book. Instead of just saying "W,X, Y, and Z believed this while A,B, C, and D believed this" he gets detailed quotes from all of them. So even though there's just 2 different answers he gives it to you 8 times. It just makes for some painful reading.

Which is not to say that there's not some good information in here. You definitely get a sense of the inner workings of the administration (semi-dysfunctional, not moreso than the past couple administrations but certainly no better) and you also realize how quickly a lot of the "official statements" that are realeased to the press are thrown together, often without a lot of consensus within the administation. And I think that overall Woodward is relatively unbiased in his reporting, which is extremely valuable. But the bottom line is that if you're looking for a good overview of the first 18 months inside the Obama Presidency, you need to look elsewhere.