By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, December 29, 2005

Bushie? The president's lovely Southern belle of a wife really does call the nickname-loving commander in chief "Bushie" in front of foreign dignitaries? Who knew?

The first lady's intimate sobriquet for her man is confirmed by Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, in one of a dozen books on foreign affairs that struck my fancy during 2005. This eclectic list skews toward works that got less attention than merited, except for George Packer's well-reviewed "The Assassins' Gate" and Meyer's controversial and memorable memoir, "DC Confidential."

Trade followed the flag in imperial days. In the information era, intellectual commerce follows attack and invasion. The war in Iraq and terrorism have elbowed aside Europe and the Cold War, Japan's alleged mastery of world economics, and other bygone Topics A at the high table of strategy and public interest.

Packer's journey from idealistic advocate of humanitarian intervention in Iraq to sadder but wiser observer of the "criminal negligence" of Bush policymakers is brilliantly reductionist. It possesses the strengths -- and the weaknesses -- of magazine journalism dedicated to telling a complex story through personality profiles set side by side to form a narrative arc.

The book is worth its moral weight for this big thought, if nothing more: "Iraq provided a blank screen on which Americans were free to project anything they wanted, and because so few Americans had anything directly at stake there, many of them never saw more than the image of their own feelings." The soldiers and their families "carried almost the entire weight of the war." Amen.

Looking for context for Packer's profiles? "Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace" is Michael Goldfarb's touching account of one Kurdish family's tragic life before and during the invasion; Bing West gives a warrior's view of the misbegotten, on-again, off-again siege of Fallujah in "No True Glory"; and Robert Kaplan takes on the world and how it is affected by America's military outreach in the thought-provoking "Imperial Grunts."

Kaplan burrows in with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Yemen, Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere as they assume the burdens of "Rome, Venice and Britain as the most morally enlightened states of their age" -- and are therefore condemned to establish themselves "in ungovernable areas for the sake of deterrence, surveillance and reconnaissance" as well as profit and pacification.

Imagine that the inept, spineless Fredo Corleone had taken over as the Godfather (rather than Michael) and you might have Flynt Leverett's picture of Bashar Assad's faltering criminal regime in "Inheriting Syria." It's a slog to read, and Leverett's suggestions for the inevitable "optimal" U.S. policy seem to bear little relationship to his own analysis. But it catches you up on the crisis to come. Mary Habeck's "Knowing the Enemy" is an accessible and useful explanation of the ideological underpinnings of jihadist terrorism.

"The Bomb in the Basement" by Israeli broadcast journalist Michael Karpin plumbs the politics of nuclear weapons strategy. Karpin is particularly good on France's indispensable help to Israel in starting its secret atomic arsenal -- see, things do change -- and the Nixon administration's undisclosed decision in 1970 to accept Israel's bomb in return for that country's pledges not to test or brandish the ultimate weapon.

Was Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima just one more box to be checked once he was told the test at Trinity had succeeded? Stephen Walker makes the case in "Shockwave" that -- given the circumstances, and the sentiments of the day -- Truman did not see it as a big decision.

"Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is this year's big biography for its icon-smashing portrait of a megalomaniacal liar who changed the world. Need a fix on the elusive Vladimir Putin? Pick up "Kremlin Rising" by my Post colleagues Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Or watch the KGB in action in "The World Was Going Our Way" by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, who trace the lasting damage done by Soviet espionage to the Third World

And so to Bushie. In his kiss-and-tell account published in London two months ago to thunderous official harrumphing, Meyer describes Laura Bush interrupting her husband, who was in mid-toast to a temporarily absent Tony Blair, at a Crawford, Tex., dinner, to say: "Bushie, you'll have to sit down" and wait for the British prime minister to reappear.

There's no sneer intended by Meyer, who is kinder to Bush than he is to Blair and the other British politicians he hosted as ambassador and invariably found wanting. This high-level account of the run-up to the Iraq invasion is thorough, credible and deflates the notion that Bush and Blair decided early on to go to war, come hell or high water.

But it also acknowledges that having seized the moral high ground, neither leader found it necessary to think through the practical problems their good intentions were about to trigger. It is thus the year's cautionary tale.

jimhoagland@washpost.com