Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush strides through ``The War Within,'' the fourth volume of Bob Woodward's Bush administration chronicles, radiating certainty, strength and presidentialness. It must have been a challenge for him to walk so confidently with Woodward's lips attached to his backside.

At the end, Woodward does append a disapproving assessment of the president (``blind faith in his instincts'' ... ``impulsiveness and carelessness'' ... ``rarely was the voice of realism''). It seems intended to counter the 400-plus pages of slavering that have gone before.

Woodward must still be nursing the wounds he received from all the critics who, he writes defensively, thought his 2002 book, ``Bush at War,'' had ``portrayed Bush as a strong, inspirational leader.'' No, no, he assures us, that wasn't what he thought: ``The president was a bully.''

Yet the president comes off as the hero in the narrowly focused story Woodward tells in this volume, which was released today. ``The War Within'' deals with the decisions that led the U.S. from the brink of catastrophe in Iraq to the successes that followed the 2007 troop surge. The president was the driving force behind the surge.

Since the Democratic opposition plays no part in Woodward's account, and he doesn't so much as mention such Republican attack dogs as Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales (who was busy during much of this period illegally politicizing the Justice Department), the picture of Bush and his security advisers he comes up with is bizarrely politics-free -- as if the war itself hadn't been a Republican invention.

Risking Disaster

Woodward concentrates on the bureaucratic infighting that preceded the troop buildup, a desperate measure that in fact risked disaster. Many of the president's military advisers, including George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, swallowed it reluctantly.

Some of them were aghast (``We need to do the worst-case, not best-case planning here,'' one fretted), because it stretched American forces to their limit. If an emergency had broken out in Iran, North Korea or anywhere else, there would have been no troops left to respond.

Woodward got plenty of face time with military officials. He especially admires General David H. Petraeus, who followed Casey as U.S. commander in Iraq and bears much of the credit for the surge's success.

There are also some surprising absences. Woodward claims Vice President Dick Cheney ``never had quite the overwhelming influence his reputation suggested,'' but he could be largely missing from these pages simply because the access Woodward is used to getting Cheney wasn't willing to grant.

Where's Rumsfeld?

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the deaf-to-all- arguments villain of Woodward's 2006 ``State of Denial'' and the policy maker who shoulders the biggest blame for our having blundered into Iraq with too few troops, is only a dim presence this time, even though he isn't fired until halfway through.

After the hundreds of pages Woodward has spent wrecking the secretary's reputation, he doesn't give him a farewell scene or report anything at all about Rumsfeld's reaction to his fall -- probably because Rumsfeld would no longer talk to him. (And why should he?)

Who talked and who wouldn't: That's the underlying story. Beneath the myriad accounts of endless policy meetings that produced long lists of recommendations for the president to ignore, Woodward's real theme is his own excellent access. He's so dazzled with his passport to the corridors of power that he fails to register the depth of the idiocy that goes on in them.

Bush Offers Advice

Where is his journalist's skepticism -- where's his outrage? Only once before that tacked-on epilogue does he show any asperity toward Bush: when the president has the nerve to start ``offering advice about how to write this book.''

Much like the Bush administration, ``The War Within'' founders on the absence of dissenting views. Without a little perspective, the modest but real gains the surge achieved are inflated into the climax of a triumphal narrative in which, through the grit and faith of a strong, stubborn president, near- defeat was transformed into victory.

Except it wasn't. The bombs are still going off in Baghdad. Al-Qaeda has been wounded but it hasn't disappeared.

And let's not forget how recently the Bush administration was crowing that it had routed the Taliban.

``The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008'' is published by Simon & Schuster (487 pages, $32).

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Craig Seligman at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 8, 2008 08:06 EDT