PLAN OF ATTACK BY BOB WOODWARD SIMON & SCHUSTER, 480 PAGES, $28 IF ...

TTACK BY BOB WOODWARD SIMON & SCHUSTER, 480 PAGES, $28

IF WE'RE LUCKY, at some point in the future a Robert Caro type will devote a decade or two to writing a brilliant, multivolume psychological profile of the Bush administration. There are enough Oedipus complexes, control issues and pathological liars to keep a keen mind busy for years. The administration itself has already leaked a startling amount of ink, as former staffers Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke have cracked the shell of secrecy with their insider accounts, sending the chattering classes onto the Sunday morning talk shows to point fingers, ask questions they don't want the answers to and generally blow smoke up the nation's ass.

While these books have spawned a niche market in splashy media hand-wringing, they mostly forego any intellectual heavy lifting, eschewing context and offering little more than hastily slapped together "man on the scene" views. The reigning king of non-contextual reportage, Bob Woodward, has now added to the pile with Plan of Attack, charting when and how the administration decided to go to war in Iraq. What he fails to answer, however, is why.

Anyone paying attention to the news already knows much of what Woodward reports: The Bush administration came into office spoiling for a fight with Iraq; Cheney, Wolfowitz and others in the administration had been publicly agitating for military action against Iraq throughout the 90s, and the administration used information from laughably unreliable sources to justify the war. Leading newspapers have been hammering this story home for well over a year now, so anyone appearing shocked by the information provided by Woodward is being more than a little disingenuous.

Woodward himself has trodden this ground before. In his hagiographic bow to the president, 2002's Bush at War, he quoted the president as telling his cabinet in September 2001 that "He [Saddam] probably was behind this in the end." Later in the book, Woodward, using one of his famous anonymous sources (though the fingerprints of Colin Powell are all over this one), he puts it a bit more bluntly: "Cheney was hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed." This has been on record since November 2002. So why the shock now?

Woodward does give us some interesting tidbits. Like the fact that one of Rumsfeld's aides says that at 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Rummy "raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks." Or that the president lied to the nation on December 28, 2001, when after a teleconference with his staff at his ranch in Crawford, TX, he told the press that they were discussing the continuing operations in Afghanistan, when they were actually drawing up war plans to take Baghdad.

But these issues have been covered elsewhere. What's been ignored for the most part in reviews of the Woodward book is the absence of his asking "Why?" Why did Cheney "have a fever" as Powell repeatedly told Woodward, to attack Iraq? Where did this fever come from? What was the reason that, "On the long walk-up to war in Iraq, Dick Cheney was a powerful, steamrolling force"?

You can't tell a story unless you give reasons for your characters' actions. Woodward provides none. The figures that populate Plan of Attack exist in a void, with nothing coming before or after. They are simply seen making decisions.

Before these decisions were made, there was Laurie Mylroie, the crackpot laureate for the "attack Iraq" movement in Washington. Sadly, she is nowhere to be found in Woodward's book. A former Harvard professor and advisor on Iraq during the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, Mylroie went off the rails after the 1993 World Trade Center attack. She blamed Iraq for that, as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, TWA flight 800 in 1996, the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia, the attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole attack in 2000 and the anthrax attacks in the United States after 9/11. Despite having zero evidence for these claims and ignoring facts that contradicted her thesis (of which there was no shortage), she published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, put out by the American Enterprise Institute in 2000, which contained most of these charges. In the book, she thanked Bush administration members John Bolton, Richard Perle, "Scooter" Libby (Vice President Cheney's chief of staff), and Paul Wolfowitz for their assistance.

I'd say that's a pretty significant omission on Woodward's part. Mylroie, Perle, Bolton and AEI have had a major impact on Bush's Iraqi policy. But Woodward is more interested in being a shill for Colin Powell's score-settling and transcribing his de facto resignation than he is in mining for the root causes of the administration's Iraq obsession.

As for Powell, the book shows he was so far removed that the Saudi ambassador was informed about the start of the war before he was. Ouch. But Powell uses Woodward to take his revenge. He, along with other anonymous sources (likely Powell's right-hand man, Richard Armitage), paint a picture of Bush as an easily manipulated man, and one who can only speak in the language of the talking points he's been given. "Powell noted silently that things didn't really get decided until the president had met with Cheney alone," he writes.

There is also some great stuff about the hatred that developed between Powell and Cheney as the two argued, and a snarky little episode about a dinner party with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Ken Adelman and Libby, celebrating the fact that they convinced Bush to go to war, during which they mock Powell mercilessly.

Like the books that came before it, Plan of Attack is just another history-on-the-fly hardback that has neither the time nor the space (or the inclination, apparently) to attempt a real analysis of why our leaders took us to war. Instead, they settle for the bells and whistles of sensationalism to hawk their books, leaving the public at the destination, but with no idea about how they got there.