Andrew Bacevich reviews new books by Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez.

Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.

Apart from the finger-pointing and score-settling, these two accounts do agree at least implicitly on a single issue: taken as a whole, the national security apparatus is irredeemably broken. The so-called “interagency process” created to harmonize the efforts of national security institutions so that the president receives sound and timely advice and to ensure that presidential decisions are promptly implemented, whether in Baghdad or within the Beltway, actually produces the opposite effect. From quite different vantage points, Feith and Sanchez affirm that the principal product generated by the interagency process is disharmony, dishonesty, and dysfunction. Whether a different process employing the same people or recruiting different people while retaining the existing process would yield different results is difficult to say. To imagine, however, that simply electing a new chief executive in November will fix the problem is surely to succumb to an illusion.