Everything they didn't want you to know about Iraq, and were afraid you'd ask

books:

	• Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War Michael Isikoff, David Corn Three Rivers Press, 2007 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 74 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Lets the facts speak for themselves

Doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you hail from, this book is important for it's factual telling of how a president and his mascot's took our country to war regardless of the facts. The only concern was that enough of the public was on their side to cover their collective butts. They could easily have been democrats as a republicans. The real lesson here is that partisan politics is a dangerous game and unhealthy for our country.

Everything they didn't want you to know about Iraq, and were afraid you'd ask

The only slight drawback to this book is that the authors clearly haven't a clue as to why any of these events took place, but they tell you that right off the top, and then make up for it by telling you everything about who, when, what, where and how in meticulous detail. It's like standing behind a bad conjuror at a kids' party. You keep wanting to yell:"Can't you see what he's doing?", but the kids are all cheering and saying it's real magic. Best of all, like the conjuror, you watch them get away with it, and collect the money on the way out! Of course, it's probably not as much fun if you were one of the kids, but for the rest of us, it's priceless :o)

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Detailed and focused

The book goes step by step, day by day, and at times hour by hour laying bare the self-deception and arrogance of the Bush years. Granted there is much the book does not cover, or glosses over while it closely follow a select few threads. Valerie Plame, the allegation that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa, the cheer-leading support by New York Times reporter Judi Miller for the Bush administration were placed under a microscrope. Sometimes the timelines became a bit dizzying. I wanted to chart it just to keep track of it. In the end it was better to focus sharply and narrowly than to lose the detail in a wide-angle view.

It is curious, however, that in this book, along with the other I've read on the the Bush Administration, that former President Bush is mentioned so rarely. The impression is that once he assigned a person to a job in the Whitehouse he did almost nothing to keep tabs on them.

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Needs Editing and A Broader Perspective

This is a useful and well-researched statement of the case against the evidence used by the Bush Administration to persuade the country to go to war against Iraq. But the book is a bit too polemical, and for my money, the most insightful and thoughtful book on the whole Iraq mess is still George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate."

The best part of the book is its discussion of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) evidence. It is clear that Cheney, Feith, Wolfowitz, and other zealots in the Administration convinced themselves that Iraq had or was about to get WMD and posed an imminent threat to the United States. The book does a terrific job of portraying the arrogance of these zealots and the appalling lack of evidence for their position. Most infuriating is the current argument that, well, we may have been wrong on the issue, but we went on the best intelligence available. There is no question that the professionals at the time completely repudiated the main points of the Administration's case. The Administration knew or should have known that (1) the so-called centrifuge tubes were for conventional rocket launchers; (2) the yellow-cake uranium purchase was a complete fiction; and (3) Iraq's WMD program and overall military strength had degraded considerably from 1991.

What is fascinating is the ability of the zealots, and the irresitable incentive to "sex" up the case for public consumption, to drive out dissenters. In the end, the Administration continued to use dubious evidence in the face of overwhelming proof to the contrary. The zealots took advantage of the professionalism and loyalty of people like Powell and others in the diplomatic, defense, and intelligence corps to push the country to war.

The book also does a good job of explaining the Hubris of the Adminstration in failing to plan for postwar Iraq and explaining the convoluted scandal of the outing of Valerie Wilson. On the latter issue, evidence of Libby's guilt is overwhelming. Rove was probably also guilty, though Prosecutor Fitzgerald comes off as too tough and smart to pick a difficult prosecutorial battle. What's most infuriating about this scandal is how little the Administration gained by outing Wilson and how much damage that caused to the nation's intelligence efforts. For all the self-righteous patriotic blather of this Administration, you'd think that someone would put the national interest ahead of a political dirty trick. There are shades here of the Nixonian equation of partisan and national interest.

Cheney-haters will love the thorough skewering the authors perform. Cheney is so laughably wrong so many times -- and the authors delight to show us all the gory details.

What's missing from the book, apart from editing that could have reduced it to half the size, is perspective and a desire to address the larger, more difficult issues presented by this sorry episode. Bush, Rumsfeld, Tenet and other key policymakers did not really care about WMD. Bush is not devastated about the failure to find WMD because he is stupid or oblivious. In the end, WMD was not what really caused him to go to war. He's telling the truth when he says the failure to find WMD and all of what happened in Iraq don't persuade him he made a mistake. WMD was a symbol and a selling point for the underyling policy. That policy was the need to project American power into the key region of instability. In the 20th century we successfully projected power to stabilize Europe; in the 21st century the thought was we would do the same thing the Middle East. The real Hubris was the failure to appreciate the overwhelming (and politically impossible) amount of resources necessary to achieve this objective and the many cultural, political, and societal differences between 20th Century Europe and 21st Century Middle East.

What also concerned the Administration was that whether or not Iraq was in a position to launch WMDs against the United States, it was inevitable that some rogue country in the new century was now able or would soon be able to threaten the nation with WMDs. Iraq had to be made an example of for general deterrence purposes. It did not really matter to Bush that Iraq had no WMDs. What matters is that it could have had them, and what matters is the message sent to other potential enemies.

I've never been persuaded by this argument and believe that 9/11 has caused too many to abandon their perspective. All it takes is 1945 technology to threaten the United States, and we've been living with the threat of destruction from Russia and other enemies for 60 years. We lack the military and political power to preempt all these enemies, and a multilateral approach better in tune with the politics and economics of each region of the world would seem to be the most sensible way of promoting security and deterring attack. We didn't win the Cold War militarily, we won it politically and economically. The same approach should be taken in the "war" on terror. Just because it's a "war" does not mean it has to be fought militarily.

The book is worthwhile but a bit superficial.

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Inside Story on Bush's Foreign Policy

This is an excellent book for those who want to find out what really led up to the invasion of Iraq.

Hubris provides a very detailed account of how the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq. It debunks the myth that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. actually believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction by demonstrating that they instead purposely ignored evidence to the contrary in order to "sell" the war. On at least one occasion when such evidence was presented to them, they replied, "Give us something we can use." The authors were no doubt better able to dig up this dirt because by the time they wrote the book, the post-invasion search had proved conclusively that Saddam did not have any WMDs. But the book details all of the people, including some at the CIA, who had concluded BEFORE THE INVASION that Saddam did not have WMDs.

The book also reveals that the Army War College wrote a lengthy report on what was likely to happen in Iraq once Saddam was toppled. The report was submitted to the White House, but it was ignored. Too bad, because it accurately predicted just about every post-invasion calamity that happened (most notably the vicious secterian violence).

There is also a great chapter on how in the hell Colin Powell came to give that now infamous speech before the United Nations - a moment that Powell now describes as "a black mark" on his career. Essentially what happened was Powell asked for all of the evidence of WMDs, spent a week reviewing it with his staff, and then rebuked CIA Director George Tenet: "Is this it?" He sent Tenet back to the drawing board, but in the end, Tenet essentially told Powell "Just take my word for it" and got Powell to give the speech. Powell's only condition was that Tenet sit behind him during the speech so that the world would know who the source of these conclusions was.

There is also a detailed chapter on exactly how Valerie Plame's husband was sent to Niger to investigate (false) reports that Saddam had procured vast amounts of enriched uranium from that country, and how Plame's name was leaked by Karl Rove to the media after her husband wrote an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times entitled, "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE INVASION OF IRAQ

Filled with news-making revelations that made it a New York Times bestseller, Hubris takes us behind the scenes at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and Congress to show how George W. Bush came to invade Iraq - and how his administration struggled with the devastating fallout.

Hubris connects the dots between Bush's expletive-laden outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, the outing of an undercover CIA officer, and the Bush administration's misleading sales campaign for war. Written by veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, this is an inside look at how a president took the nation to war using faulty and fraudulent intelligence. It's a dramatic page-turner and an intriguing account of conspiracy, backstabbing, bureaucratic ineptitude, journalistic malfeasance, and arrogance.

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