BEHIND THE SURGE: Reading Bob Woodward's The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 is like reading raw transcripts of documents and interviews from a sensational murder trial: you know what happens, and you know who the victim and the perpetrator are. But to read their actual words is chilling. It's the In Cold Blood of national security journalism.

Woodward gives us some juicy tidbits: that the United States spied on Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, that a supersecret high-tech assassination program killed large numbers of militants beginning in May 2006 and so on. But the core of Woodward's book is an account of how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, a rogue general named Jack Keane and a team of strategists at the American Enterprise Institute, all coordinated by the sycophantic, Bush-worshiping National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, rode roughshod over the entire Washington establishment to prolong the war in Iraq by launching the "surge" in January 2007. Consider this: had they not done so, today, two years later, the war would largely be over.

In 2006, Woodward makes clear, the overwhelming consensus, among the public and in Washington, was for ending the war and starting the drawdown of US forces. That was the belief of Gen. George Casey, the US commander in Iraq; Gen. John Abizaid, the Centcom commander; and nearly all of the uniformed military. It was the view of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, the State Department and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. In 487 pages, Woodward details how all of them were steamrollered.

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