The book's biggest failing is in its reverential treatment of Paul Wolfowitz. Mann documents his calling for the toppling of Saddam Hussein as early as 1993 in a National Review article, and notes that his "greatest passion" was always devoted to Iraq. Yet it is remarkable that in such a generally exhaustive and excellently researched work, Mann does not devote any space to Wolfowitz's deservedly notorious 1992 memorandum while undersecretary of defense for policy to the first President Bush, arguing that maintaining the territorial integrity of Lithuania should be a priority foreign policy goal for the United States of such importance that it should be worth waging a full scale conventional war with Russia to maintain it. So enthusiastically did Wolfowitz warm to this theme in the memo, which was subsequently leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, that he even enumerated in some detail the military forces which would be needed to wage it: the number of fighter squadrons, aircraft carrier battle groups operating in the Baltic Sea, and NATO combat divisions.

Wolfowitz has since tried to dismiss the memorandum as a contingency study of the kind any responsible military planners would make. But it deserves closer examination. Proposals that Wolfowitz penned at the same time about U.S. global dominance and the need to take out Saddam have since been translated into reckless reality. One should not rule out his capability to make other mad dreams real as well, regardless of the cost that others will have to pay in blood for them.

Wolfowitz on Iraq as described by Mann is Wolfowitz as he wishes to be seen -- and perhaps even sees himself. Here is a dignified, cautious, responsible intellectual heavyweight, a moderate centrist who comes late in the day and reluctantly, but only after soberly weighing all things in the balance, to the profound conclusion that Iraq must be conquered for the Good of the Republic and to end its very real threat of weapons of mass destruction. It has about as much connection to reality as describing Saddam Hussein as a social democrat.

There is no hint here of the Wolfowitz of reality as documented already two years ago by Bob Woodward in "Bush at War," the Wolfowitz who within 48 hours of 9/11, while the hellish flames were still burning at ground zero and the death clouds had not yet dissipated over Manhattan, was already urging the president to focus on invading Iraq rather than hunting down al-Qaida for no better reason than it would be easier to do. There is no hint in Mann of the relentless disparaging of U.S. intelligence, the State Department, and the CIA, and even those honorable analysts within the Pentagon power structure who dared to defy the determination of the deputy defense secretary and his cohorts that responsibility for the atrocity be hung on Iraq even when there was never a scintilla of serious evidence to support it.

Nor does Mann document the embarrassing fact that this supposedly wise and dignified figure and those he convinced were wildly, irresponsibly, ludicrously, incompetent and catastrophically wrong in every intelligence estimate they made on Iraq -- even though two of the Vulcans, Powell and Armitage, had authorized before the war a massive 17-volume State Department assessment titled "The Future of Iraq" that proved right in every major particular, but which was contemptuously ignored then and thereafter by the Pentagon hawks and White House. Hundreds of Americans have already paid with their lives for that combination of arrogance and incompetence, and the death toll is growing and even metastasizing.

Mann is not unique in falling for Wolfowitz's well-documented soft-spoken charm, when he wants to use it. Wolfowitz's playing of experienced and influential senior journalists in Washington and New York, and his success in getting them to take him at his own highly inflated estimation, is the most successful and striking since the heyday of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger or James A. Baker. But Kissinger, like his contemporary and rival Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter's national security advisor), was an intellectual figure of genuine and great distinction before he ever appeared in Washington, while Baker was an immensely experienced and genuinely cautious and responsible power-player in positions of authority in the White House and as secretary of the treasury before he became secretary of state. Wolfowitz, in striking contrast to the seductive persona depicted by supposedly skeptical journalists, had a well-documented track record of being a reckless gambler and plunger, who spoke and argued in the most sweeping and dangerous terms. The New York Times' Bill Keller noted, in his generally very sympathetic and largely uncritical study of Wolfowitz in the Sept. 22, 2002, Sunday New York Times Magazine, that the deputy defense secretary was convinced from the word "go" that Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attacks, and that Wolfowitz "wrote a sympathetic blurb" for Laurie Mylroie's book blaming the World Trade Center attack in 1993 on Iraq and connecting the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing with Iraq -- all wild allegations without evidence.

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