State of Denial: Bush at war (part III) Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, 560pp, £18.99 ISBN 0743295668

In his latest foray as Washington's channeller-in-chief, Bob Woodward writes that a film on the presidency of George W Bush might open in the Oval Office on 26 January 2001, a week after Bush's inauguration, when Donald Rumsfeld is being sworn in as secretary of defence. I would urge Hollywood to choose another scene documented by Woodward. It takes place a month earlier. Bush and the man who would become his vice-president, Dick Cheney, have lunch with Rumsfeld, who "blew into the meeting like a tornado, full of excitement and vision . . . He seemed to know everything. Bush was surprised to be so impressed." Rumsfeld's magic lingers still in the White House. Cheney, of course, has proven to be the most powerful vice-president in recent American history, the driving force behind all of Bush's wars. These two men loom so large in the Bush years that the third figure in this triumvirate, the president himself, seems unable to get out of their shadow.

Bush figures little in the first 200 pages of State of Denial. It's all Rumsfeld and Cheney as the United States prepares for the invasion of Iraq. By the time Bush ambles into Woodward's narrative, all the traps have been set, the mistakes made. America is heading for disaster, and Bush, as the book's damning title suggests, is unwilling or unable to change its course. Woodward doesn't do analysis or insight: it's not his style. But as anecdote builds on anecdote - Iraq war doubters ignored, even ridiculed; naysayers sidelined; nuance and hesitation ground underfoot - Woodward whittles away at the Bush administration. Even under the author's gentle touch, what's left is unmistakably a failed presidency.

Some of the detail is juicy, especially about just how Rumsfeld's defence department out manoeuvred Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council and Colin Powell's state department. General Jay Garner, Washington's first post-conflict point man in Baghdad, was one of Woodward's key sources for State of Denial - and one of the bloodiest victims of the Cheney-Rumsfeld machine. He tells Woodward the story of assembling the team he wanted to take into Iraq. At one meeting on the eve of the invasion in 2003, he encountered a state department civil servant named Tom Warrick, who had obviously done a lot of work on Iraq. Garner hired him on the spot, but the new team member didn't last long. A few days later, Rumsfeld told Garner to fire Warrick, saying he had "gotten this request from such a high level that I can't turn it down". "There's no negotiation here?" asked Garner. "I'm sorry," Rumsfeld replied. "There really isn't." Later, Garner made a point of getting to the bottom of this little mystery. Warrick's crime was to have got on the wrong side of Ahmad Chalabi, the neo-cons' favourite Iraqi exile. And the "high level" from which the firing order had come? The vice-president's office.

Woodward writes that when Garner returned to Washington in June 2003, he told Rumsfeld that the US had made "three terrible decisions" - disbanding the army, purging the bureaucracy and dismissing an interim leadership group. Rumsfeld's response: "I don't think there's anything we can do, because we are where we are." The White House response to Woodward's book is of the "we are where we are" school. State of Denial, a presi dential spokesman said, is like "cotton candy. It kind of melts on contact." True, this book doesn't shock or surprise. That's because the hard evidence against the Bush team, in the form of inside accounts, has been coming in for some time now - from Michael Gordon's Cobra II, Tom Ricks's Fiasco and Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. That we're not surprised any more is the worst possible news for the Bush presidency. The world and now America take it for granted that the war was fought on false premises and the aftermath badly planned. These are known knowns, as Rumsfeld might put it.

State of Denial is the third in Woodward's "Bush at War" series. The first two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, were generally positive towards the president and his team. Because of the books' somewhat bland, "just the facts, ma'am" style, Woodward was roundly criticised as a lapdog presidential note-taker who heard only the voices of his master and his master's acolytes. In State of Denial, the reporter who helped crack Watergate and, with Carl Bernstein, brought us All the President's Men, the behind-the-scenes account of their great journalistic triumph three decades ago, is only slightly less dainty in his treatment of Bush's men and women. In his interviews with Rumsfeld for this book, Woodward makes plain his shock and disbelief at Rummy's apparent evasions and denials. A member in good standing of the Washington establishment, Woodward is not a Rottweiler type. But this time around, at least he bares his teeth.

Stryker McGuire is Newsweek's bureau chief in London

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