Somewhere along the way, Bob Woodward decided to transition from being a newspaper reporter to a Big Thinker. We see evidence of this in Woodward’s piece in the Washington Post “Outlook” section, “10 Take Aways From the Bush Years,” in which Woodward informs us that “There’s actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush.”

Rather than bore Cornerites with a point-by-point rejoinder, it might be instructive to take just one of Woodward’s ten take-aways and examine it with a bit of care.

According to Woodward, Lesson #3 is “A president must do the homework to master the fundamental ideas and concepts behind his policies.” To support this point, Woodward writes this:

The president should not micromanage, but understanding the ramifications of his positions cannot be outsourced to anyone. For example, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq in 2004-07, concluded that President Bush lacked a basic grasp of what the Iraq war was about. Casey believed that Bush, who kept asking for enemy body counts, saw the war as a conventional battle, rather than the counterinsurgency campaign to win over the Iraqi population that it was. “We cannot kill our way to victory in Iraq,” Gen. David Petraeus said later. In May 2008, Bush insisted to me that he, of all people, knew all too well what the war was about.

Here’s the thing, though: General Casey (according to Woodward’s own book, The War Within) strongly opposed the so-called surge, which took a war we were losing in Iraq and put us on the path to success. And it was President Bush, in the face of extraordinary opposition, who championed the new counterinsurgency strategy in January 2007. And it was Bush who placed the remarkable David Petraeus in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, replacing the beleaguered Casey.

So it was General Casey, not President Bush, who “lacked a basic grasp of what the Iraq war was about.” And the theory behind the surge’s counterinsurgency strategy was the opposite of a “body count” approach (it was population-centric and depended on winning over the confidence and support of the Iraqi people). If Bush can be faulted, it is that he stayed with Casey’s “light footprint” strategy for too long. Yet Woodward uses Casey (who was obviously a key source for Woodward’s book) to bludgeon Bush for not mastering the concepts behind his policies.

These are the kind of deep insights that will win you a seat at the table with Larry King.

Bob Woodward should stick to reporting.