[NYTr] Bk Rvw: The Fall of the House of Bush

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by MichaelP

Chicago Reader - Dec 20, 2007
http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/bookreviews/2007/071220/

Book Review

"The Fall of the House of Bush" by Craig Unger

Bush and the Neocons

When you know the Truth, the facts don't seem so important.

By Chris Pepus

Craig Unger, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, garnered national 
attention with his previous book, House of Bush, House of Saud.  Michael 
Moore cited it as a key source for Fahrenheit 9/11, and the film 
popularized the author's reports on Saudi investments in Bush family 
enterprises. In The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a 
Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, 
and Still Imperils America's Future, Unger turns his attention to 
neoconservative officials and theorists. At times he focuses so closely on 
neocon tactics that he misses other forces driving Bush-Cheney policies. 
Even so, the book offers a vivid account of the use of disinformation to 
promote extremism.

Unger traces the origins of Bush's foreign policy to the 1970s, when 
prominent bureaucrats and writers gathered around such converts to 
conservatism as Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. The neocons scored 
their first big success in 1976, when two of their allies in President 
Ford's administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, created a group 
outside the CIA to assess the Soviet threat. That panel, dubbed Team B, 
was staffed by neocon worthies and led by Richard Pipes of Harvard 
University. One of the group's advisers was a Wohlstetter protege named 
Paul Wolfowitz.

Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and 
that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin's drive for 
world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy 
of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering--as 
CIA officers pointed out. Pipes's group held, for instance, that the USSR 
had probably deployed a top-secret antisubmarine system, even though U.S. 
intelligence had found no credible evidence of such a program. As Unger 
writes, "The absence of evidence, [Team B] reasoned, merely proved how 
secretive the Soviets were!" It was a bold preemptive attack on fact and 
logic.

Team B's creativity went unrewarded in the short term, as Jimmy Carter won 
the presidency that year. But Ronald Reagan would use the panel's report 
to justify his enormous military buildup (and consequent budget deficits) 
in the 1980s, and in the '90s Team B alumni and followers took aim at the 
Clinton administration's Middle East policy. In 1996 a group of neocons 
led by Richard Perle produced a policy statement, "A Clean Break," that 
prescribed military action to remove anti-Israel governments like Saddam 
Hussein's. When George W. Bush entered office, flanked by Cheney, 
Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, it became a blueprint for war.

Unger is at his best in these early chapters, where he convincingly links 
neocon biases to the Republicans' most disastrous policies. He gleans a 
thicket of reports and think-tank papers to reveal that the Bush 
administration's claims about Iraqi weapons programs followed the same 
pattern as Team B's exaggeration of Soviet power in the 1970s.  Likewise, 
many of the administration's rosy projections for post-Saddam Iraq 
originated with the authors of "A Clean Break." In 1999 one of them, David 
Wurmser, stated that Iraq's Shiite majority "can be expected to present a 
challenge to Iran's influence" instead of aligning with Iran. Wurmser 
offered no factual support for his claim, but wrote that his thinking had 
been "guided" by his\\ ideological allies, such as Ahmed Chalabi. By that 
point, Unger writes, "the neocon echo chamber had begun to rely on itself 
to reinforce its own myths."

Four and a half years into the Iraq war, the price of upholding those 
myths is rising. The president and vice president appear smitten by the 
idea of air strikes against Iran. Unger cites Philip Giraldi, a former CIA 
specialist in counterterrorism, who argued that in the case of Iran, Bush 
officials were "using the same dance steps--demonize the bad guys, the 
pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq 
redux."

Describing three decades of right-wing gambits, Unger paints a stunning 
portrait of arrogance and duplicity. The Fall of the House of Bush may be 
the definitive group biography of the neocons. But he makes a few missteps 
when the story moves beyond that group. For instance, he calls President 
Bush a "genuine born-again Christian,"  despite finding evidence that the 
president's professions of faith are as cynical as anything Team B ever 
presented. Bush maintains that Billy Graham converted him to evangelical 
Christianity in 1985, but Graham has disagreed with that and so has Mickey 
Herskowitz, a ghostwriter of Bush's 1999 autobiography.

Herskowitz told Unger that Bush couldn't recall the details of his 1985 
meeting with Graham and replied negatively when Herskowitz asked him 
whether Graham had said something like, "Have you gotten right with God?" 
(Herskowitz was "stunned" by the book's account of Bush's conversation 
with the minister.) "Witnessing" about your relationship with Christ is a 
key element of evangelicalism. Lying about your conversion experience for 
electoral gain is just about the last thing a sincere evangelical would 
do.

Unger also underplays the importance of oil-industry leaders, including 
his previous subjects, the Saudis. In his 2006 book Armed Madhouse, 
journalist Greg Palast writes about a 2000 report by the\ Joint Task Force 
on Petroleum, cosponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute (named for 
and headed by Bush I's secretary of state). The panel, which included oil 
execs as well as foreign-policy specialists, complained that Iraq was a 
"swing producer" of oil, with a propensity to "manipulate oil markets." 
Saddam Hussein had a history of abruptly suspending and restarting oil 
production. In fact, he interrupted petroleum exports for 12 days the 
month the task force began its work. His tactics undermined efforts by the 
oil companies and Saudi-dominated OPEC to control the price of crude. An 
earlier assessment by the Baker Institute put it this way:  "In a market 
with so little cushion to cover unexpected events, oil prices become 
extremely sensitive to perceived supply risks. Such a market increases the 
potential leverage of an otherwise lesser producer such as Iraq." For its 
part the task force recommended "an immediate policy review toward Iraq," 
including military options.  Palast says Cheney got its report early in 
2001, and its economic considerations may have provided the strongest 
impetus for war.

Likewise, the Saudis have played a large role in developing Bush's 
aggressive approach toward Iran and Shiite Muslims throughout the Middle 
East. (Saudi rulers are Sunnis.) Bush and his aides choose to blame Iran 
for the disaster in Iraq, even though it's the Sunnis who've inflicted the 
majority of casualties on U.S. troops. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh has 
reported that the administration has joined the Saudis in providing 
clandestine support to Sunni extremists in Lebanon and Syria. The 
president hopes these Sunni militias will attack Iran's allies and not 
America's, even though some of those receiving aid have ideological 
affinities with Al Qaeda. It's an astonishing policy, completely at odds 
with the lessons of 9/11 and battlefield realities in Iraq. That 
contradiction is the best indicator of the House of Saud's continuing grip 
on Bush-Cheney foreign policy. The administration's close ties with the 
Saudi royals demonstrate that there are limits to the influence of the 
neocons, many of whom advocate regime change in Saudi Arabia.

Bush and his aides cite Iran's nuclear capability as justification for air 
strikes. But Hersh has reported that American intelligence thinks Iran 
won't have the ability to produce a warhead until sometime between 2010 
and 2015. And according to an intelligence estimate released December 3, 
the country shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. These 
assessments appear to have done little to deter the administration's drive 
toward confrontation. "Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge 
necessary to make a nuclear weapon," said President Bush in response to 
the new intelligence estimate. "What's to say they couldn't start another 
covert nuclear weapons program?"