The cult is back --Call it de ja Woodward.

For a couple of weeks, I've been reading national columnists' mostly admiring references to Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward's new book tracing the Bush run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Many of those columnists hadn't actually read the book; they were quoting snippets of it, or basing their comments on press accounts of its revelations.

Fourteen months ago in this space, I wrote a column on Woodward's previous Bush book, Bush at War, an account of Dubya's response to 9-11. Finally, after having read Plan, went back to reread my old review, entitled "The Cult of Washington."

"This virtually defines the 'cult of Washington,' the Beltway insiderism that many Americans intuitively resent... The very word 'Washington,' in much of the rest of the world, evokes less admiration than fear, resentment, and bewilderment that its key players seem to operate in an alternative universe from the rest of the world. Bush at War is a credulous account of that alternate universe." Much of the buzz over Woodward's new book is based on the premise that because Woodward was so uncritical in his last book, Bush Administration sources spoke freely with him this time about their plans, developed since early in their administration, to unilaterally invade Iraq. The underlying assumption is that they wouldn't have been so open with a reporter that they thought might actually come after them, and now Woodward has.

But here's the kicker: he didn't. Woodward's Plan of Attack is every bit the work of stenography that his previous book was: an endless succession of recent historical portrayals of Beltway meetings and the power players who attended them. The uproar is not over Woodward's conclusions -- he doesn't really offer any. It's over his research into what actually happened.

Unless you're a political junkie, and maybe even if you are, this is not riveting stuff. But far more disturbing is what, once again, Woodward has left out of his book -- namely, the rest of the universe. Here, again, the words from last year ring true:

"Woodward's narrative is astonishingly claustrophobic. We read about what the protagonists say and do. We don't read about the impacts of their decisions, even when those decisions, for better and for worse, affect millions of lives.

"The sad part of Woodward's book is that many Americans will read it and come away feeling that they're now fully informed about both recent history and American foreign policy. Woodward's book, by its approach, necessarily humanizes its powerful subjects; it never humanizes the people impacted by their often shockingly callous abstract decisions. In many cases, Woodward -- like his protagonists--fails even to acknowledge those people."

Different book, same problem. Woodward even falls prey to the same sort of instant historical mythmaking as his subjects, as when, for example, he repeatedly invokes the notion that Saddam Hussein "kicked out" UN weapon inspectors in 1998. For the record, the UN evacuated them at US request before Baghdad was bombed; Saddam refused to allow them back in when it emerged that the US had, cont million or so people that marched against the war in February 2003? Woodward gives the day three paragraphs, of which one sentence mentions -- obliquely -- the public's outrage: "Bush's chief allies -- Blair, Howard of Australia and Aznar of Spain -- were getting serious heat at home."

The many hundreds of thousands that marched across the US rate no mention at all, but that's consistent; they didn't exist in Bush's world, so they don't exist in Woodward's. This, ultimately, is the insiderist failing of Plan of Attack. It reveals in shocking detail the obsessiveness of Bush and his inner circle as they plan for, and get, their war, but Woodward's view is just as claustrophobic, just as lacking in context, and ultimately just as uninterested in consequences. It's why people hate Washington.

The one editorial choice Woodward does make is to emphasize how little George Bush questions his own actions; he thinks about his decisions ahead of time, we learn, and so sees no point in rethinking them later.

Unfortunately, Bob Woodward doesn't ask those questions or do that rethinking either. If he had, his book might be a tour de force. Instead, it's a prose equivalent to the Congressional Record: useful, but hardly good bedtime reading, and very much uninterested in either the accountability of its protagonists or the illumination of its readers.