In the copious interviews that Bob Woodward has given promoting his new book, The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008, he has put forward a new reason meant to explain the success of U.S. forces in Iraq since January 2007: a “secret program” that the military used to kill terrorists. In a recent CNN interview, he compared this program to the Manhattan Project. As CNN reports, “Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.” Woodward promises that “some day in history” the full details of the United States’s top-secret enhanced operational capabilities will be “be described to people’s amazement.” Generally the turnaround in Iraq has been attributed to the troop “surge,” the shift in American strategy toward classical counterinsurgency operations, and the emergence of such local allies as the Iraqi Awakening movement. Does Woodward have his finger on a new explanation that has heretofore been overlooked? On Tuesday, a senior U.S. military intelligence officer provided me with the following skeptical analysis of Woodward’s claims: