Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush

Craig Unger's new book on the Bush dynasty could probably be more accurately titled, The Iraq War and the Twilight on the Bush II Presidency. It's largely an account of how the influence of the neoconservatives and the Christian Right converged in the Republican Party to produce the Iraq War after the 9/11 attacks, using the latter as a justification for a far-reaching, radical foreign policy.

Unger has done his own extensive interviews with many of the key players in his story, as well as using the many available secondary sources to construct his narrative. He does a good job of telling the story, including the disgraceful role of the Establishment press, although he does seem a bit too wedded to conventional political wisdom on some points. He also gives credit to the liberal blogosphere for keeping questions and issues in play that the mainstream press was ignoring or underplaying, like the serious questions about the necons' claims about the now-infamous aluminum tubes.

These contemporary histories are important because they preserve a lot of current perspectives, including their limitations, in a way that will become a challenge to reconstruct some day. Especially since the Iraq War is such an historic disaster and everyone is already trying to distance themselves from the many failures involved. We can see already in Unger's account that the material that has so far leaked through Dick Cheney's thick wall of official secrecy makes the story of the Iraq War look much uglier than it did as it was unfolding. And to those who were really paying attention, it looked very ugly at the time.

Unger's narrative gives a good idea of the various factors that went into the Iraq War: neoconservative grand strategies of forcibly remaking Middle Eastern nations to be more congenial to the West and to Israel; access to oil supplies; the scams run by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi emigrants; the lobbying efforts for Likud Party-oriented pro-Israel groups, especially AIPAC; and, Christianist notions about bringing on the end of the world and the return of Christ by escalating tensions in the Middle East. More subjectively, there were psychological factors including Bush's desire to outshine his father as a military conqueror; neocon group dynamics that led to shared assumptions not being adequately questioned; and, Dick Cheney's authoritarianism.

It would be inaccurate to reduce a political event as important as the Iraq War to psychological causes. But I was particularly intrigued by Unger's description of neocon group dynamics, which he describes as reaching a cultlike intensity. Because of their shared friendships and interlocking front groups (Unger uses the term), they created a kind of extended groupthink in which the fantastic and foolish notion was validated and revalidated that conquering Iraq and installing a subservient government would be quick and easy, and this would set the stage for a rapid series of regime changes in Iran, Syria and beyond.

Unger at one point seems to be saying that it was the grand neocon strategy of serial regime change that was the real reason for the Iraq War. But I don't think its meaningful to exclude those other factors. The role of oil has never given me the kind of contortions that it seem to induce in some people. It's pretty obvious to me that all American policies in the Middle East need to take oil supplies into account. It would be irresponsible not to do so. The fact that some oil companies may have colluded with Cheney to arrange oil deals for themselves is something that deserves detailed official investigation than it has so far received. But even if there are some players who turn out to be stereotypical cynical manipulators concerned only with oil riches, that doesn't eliminate the other factors as important.

Unger gives a good blow-by-blow description of how the measures the neocons and Cheney's office set up to "stovepipe" raw intelligence to policymakers while bypassing the elaborate vetting process of the official intelligence agencies. This process meant that the various neocons in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President could cherry-pick data bits which fit their own narrow and unrealistic preconceptions and ignore others. No President should simply set policy based on intelligence recommendations. It's the President's job to make decisions based on a wide variety of considerations. But the "stovepiping" process is a real reminder how important it is to have raw intelligence information carefully vetted by people who are looking for factual information more than for bits of useful propaganda.

In dealing with present-day issues of transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation, having accurate intelligence is especially important. The recklessness and destructiveness of Cheney and Bush in this regard is staggering, just based on what we already know. I shudder to think what the picture will look like when considerably more key information becomes public.

Unger also does a good job of highlighting the dubious role of longtime neocon player Michael Ledeen, another of the Iran-Contra veterans who have played destructive roles during this administration. Unger also weaves the story of the Joe Wilson mission to Niger and the subsequent Valerie Plame exposure into his narrative, which is one of the key things that reminds us how much uglier the story looks with the then-behind-the-scenes material included.

The particular idiocy and recklessness of neocon bigwig Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle also comes out clearly in Unger's narrative. For instance, Perle wrote an editorial that appeared in USA Today on 05/01/03, the same day as Bush's "Mission Accomplished" extravaganza on the USS Abraham Lincoln. It was entitled Relax, Celebrate Victory. The great strategic thinker wrote of the Iraq War, "From start to finish, President Bush has led the United States and its coalition partners to the most important military victory since World War II." To repeat, this was May of 2003.

Unger gives what's probably my favorite Perle quote, too, from just before the start of the Iraq War: "If we just let our vision of the world go forth and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now." (my emphasis) What.A.Fool.

But let's give the Prince of Darkness credit. People are already singing songs about the Iraq War. The best-known ones and the ones that are likely to endure are those about what a horrible decision it was.

If I had to make just one criticism of Unger's book, it would be that in his very useful and informative sketch of the history of the Christian Right, he fails to make clear what a central role the politics of segregation and racism played in its formulation and the extent to which the neosegregationist outlook is identified with the Christian Right/Christian fundamentalist/Christian dominionist supporters.

This leads him astray, for example, when he repeats the press corps conventional wisdom about the 2004 election that it was primarily decided by "values" voters. He fails to ask how many of those who identified "values" as their key concern would ever have considered voting for a Democrat in any case, or how many of those were Southern and/or rural/small town whites. Because to a considerable part of the Christian Right base, "values" means "keeping us white folks safe from scary black people". Gays and immigrants may irritate them, too. But there is a heavy continuity between the old segregationist vote and today's Christianist vote. This is something the late Steve Gilliard was very good about reminding us. And he was right. You can't understand the Christian Right voting phenomenon without understanding its connection with segregationist and now what I call neosegregationist sentiments.

He also seems to be hanging on to the notion that Colin Powell is somehow a tragic but sympathetic figure who was victimized by the neocons. I have no sympathy for Powell's role in the Iraq War catastrophe. He knew that Cheney's people were trying to scam the country into war. And his presentation at the United Nations in February 2002 was key to enabling the war. He had every reason to know what he was going was irresponsible, and that he was facilitating an unnecessary and illegal war. But he did it anyway. To Unger's credit, despite his seeming sympathy for Powell, he describes how Powell's ignored his own State Department's intelligence specialists in the preparation of that infamous UN presentation.

Unger's acceptance of the misleading "values" version of the 2004 election leads him astray into accepting a flawed Culture War framework of American politics, with particular reference to 2004:

By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq - the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue, evangelical Christians, antiabortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned U.S. policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.

This is an example of the journalistic habit of providing "balance" by making both sides of a controversy sound equally to blame or equally deserving of consideration. But the impression this view leaves is very misleading. For Christianist "culture warriors", the Iraq War does indeed serve as a litmus test for their rejection of the dirty hippies and rampaging evil black people of their fantasies. This is why what support their is left for the Cheney-Bush Iraq policy is restricted to conservative white Republicans, and even some of those have faltered.

Most Americans, though, have a far more pragmatic view of the Iraq War. You hardly need to approve of hippie communes with mass orgies on the weekends to see it doesn't make any sense to keep 160,000 American troops fighting in a conflict where the protracted conflict itself has become more of a problem than leaving could cause. There are "both sides" to culture war issues like gay marriage. But when it comes to the Iraq War, there's basically only one side that sees it as organically tied to abstinence-only education and literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, christianism, craig unger, dick cheney, fall of the house of bush, iran-contra, iraq war, michael ledeen, richard perle