'Obama's Wars': Bob Woodward offers juicy portraits from Obamaland, concentrating more on political struggles in the U.S. than war abroad; Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
OBAMA’S WARS
Bob Woodward
The title refers less to actual combat than to closed-door battles in Washington as Barack Obama spent months wrestling over questions left unanswered by his predecessor: what are we trying to do in Afghanistan? And how the heck do we get out? Obama, who campaigned on the promise of a swift withdrawal from Iraq, quickly runs into a brick wall of Pentagon brass committed to a long war in Afghanistan. Obama asks for three options, but his generals keep bringing him one: 40,000 troops for a “counter-insurgency” effort aimed at “defeating” the Taliban. Woodward’s Obama—cool and cerebral, but constrained by finances and political realities—eventually downgrades to a more modest aspiration of “degrading” the Taliban enough that the whole mess can be handed over to Afghan security forces. Distrustful of his top generals, and beset by doubts, Obama personally dictates a plan for a surge of 30,000 troops followed by a drawdown to start in July 2011.
Woodward, who also chronicled George W. Bush’s wars, delivers juicy portraits from Obamaland. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a “delusional” manic depressive who goes “off his meds.” Bush’s outgoing CIA director brags of “owning” certain governments. Obama expects Hillary Rodham Clinton to be loyal because she stuck with Bill, but Clinton forms a hawkish alliance with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden’s long-winded appeals for fewer troops go ignored.
Adding to the drama is Obama’s growing realization that Afghanistan has been displaced as the front line in the terror wars. Pakistan features an unstable government, 150 terrorist camps and 100 nuclear weapons. It receives billions in American aid, while helping arm the Afghan Taliban and terrorists who attack nuclear rival India. “We have to make clear to the people that the cancer is in Pakistan,” says Obama, who steps up strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas by unmanned drones. But as tensions with Pakistan continue to rise and effective policy options are few, one thing is clear: there will be plenty of fodder for a sequel.
- LUIZA CH. SAVAGE
STEALING THE MYSTIC LAMB: THE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST COVETED MASTERPIECE
Noah Charney
At two tonnes in weight, the Ghent altarpiece completed by Jan van Eyck in 1432, often called the Mystic Lamb after its central image, is hardly an obvious candidate for the title of “world’s most frequently stolen artwork,” but with everyone from Napoleon to Hitler having had a go, and over 13 separate thefts, so it is. Part of the motive, of course, is the transcendent beauty of its painted wooden panels and its claim to be perhaps the most important painting in history. Van Eyck didn’t invent oil painting, but he was the first to exploit its possibilities in depicting light and detail, and the panels are medieval in their Gothic styling but Renaissance in their naturalism: the altarpiece, in fact, is a hinge between two major eras in Western art. Yet another impetus behind the thieving was van Eyck’s complex symbolism. What was he really depicting? Are those Knights Templar approaching the lamb? Are there references, à la Dan Brown, to the Holy Bloodline (Christ’s descendents); is there a coded map locating the Spear of Destiny (the lance that pierced Christ’s side)? Serious conspiracy enthusiasts have always been interested in the altarpiece.
In Charney’s hands, the story of the various heists often reads like a political thriller. By the time French revolutionaries, soon emulated by Napoleon, took to systematic art looting—at first to pay off starving soldiers, but leading to the Louvre becoming a world-class showroom—the template was set for Nazi plundering. A priest managed to hide the altarpiece from the Germans during the First World War, but by the end of the Second, it was found in an Austrian salt mine. Among 12,000 objects there, the Mystic Lamb was one of 53 tagged “A.H. Linz”—destined for the super-museum Adolf Hitler had planned for the Austrian city.
- BRIAN BETHUNE
