Wolfowitz's success in blinding even serious and experienced reporters provides an example of the lifelong distrust my old friend the late I.F. Stone expressed for "access journalism" -- the top Washington journalistic goal of gaining sympathetic access to one's highest-level sources that so often results in unwittingly becoming their amplifiers or puppets.

Wolfowitz's friend and benefactor, national security advisor Rice, has been another beneficiary of this familiar relationship. Like Wolfowitz, her academic track record in books and serious research is actually negligible. Like Wolfowitz, she is rather an experienced courtier skilled in the ways of deference and flattery to those in power and who share similar moralistic and simplistic views of the world. Like him, she knows how to work the media and appear dignified and "thoughtful" in public -- as long as she is not pressed with hostile questioning too hard. And, as Mann documents very clearly, she like he was shaped by late Cold War certainties, and brought those views unmodified by experience or changing circumstance to a completely different era that both could speak glibly about but that neither began to understand. 9/11, as Mann vividly shows, came as a bolt from the blue to both of them and their friends.

Mann, therefore, for all his solid and very valuable reporting, has written an incomplete book -- and the problem is not what he put in but what he left out. Ahmed Chalabi, the corrupt Iraqi National Congress leader who led the Vulcan hawks by the nose and is now their chosen candidate to run Iraq with an iron hand, bamboozled them with one wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claim about Iraq after another, yet he rates only a single mention in the index; and Clarke, as noted above, none at all.

Mann also sincerely but incorrectly greatly underestimates the vast influence Richard Perle has wielded in the policymaking circles of the Bush administration. But Perle is only described as a former official and one of the outside-the-government leaders in the argument to prosecute the war in Iraq. There is no sense reading Mann of the hothouse environment of the neoconservative movement, or the disciplined and extraordinarily coordinated way in which they place their Op-Ed pieces, give the appropriate leaks and quotes to compliant and eager journalists who would swallow them whole, mutually boost the myths of each other's brilliance, and disparage their political and intellectual opponents with a sustained level of invective unseen in American public discourse since the worst of the Joe McCarthy red-baiting years. Yet anyone who has opened a newspaper or read a neoconservative magazine at least once since 9/11 knows this to be a truism.

Mann spoke to his subjects too much. He took them too much at their own estimation. Discussing those responsible for the great security failure of 9/11, he displays no anger and apportions no blame. Faced with the reality of an unnecessary war in Iraq entered into on the grounds of intelligence that was distorted, hyped and false -- and known to be so at the time, as far more solid, cautious and sober assessments that were widely available at the time warned -- Mann is quiet.

Whatever caveats one may have with some of Mann's interpretations, of the abundant and valuable material he has assembled, his final conclusion appears irrefutable. "There was no question," he writes, "that the Vulcans' venture into Iraq grew out of their previous thirty five years of thinking about America's role in the world ... It was the story of the pursuit of unrivaled American power."

But there is a bit more to it than that. Under a weak, insecure and inexperienced president, Bush's hawks finally got the chance to put their sweeping and simplistic theories into practice. They were taken totally by surprise by 9/11 and then used it as the pretext to implement their long cherished enterprise of conquering Iraq. Beyond that, they had thought through and anticipated nothing. And what are the results? Just click on the evening news tonight to see the scenes in Iraq right now. The consequences of these Vulcans' certainties are coming home in body bags from halfway round the world, day by day. And they will continue to do so.

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