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Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War | List Price: $25.95
Discount Price: $9.49
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Binding: Hardcover
Release Date: 2006-09-08
HUBRIS OR NARCOLEPSY? [Posted on 2008-03-06]
Isikoff and Corn have a lot of blame to distribute for the march to an unneccessary war in Iraq. Neocons and other leaders within the administration acted on unchecked intelligence sources when it suited their purpose and ignored contrary facts when they threatened to slow the march. There was rarely a fact the administration was unwilling to distort or a patriot it was unwilling to defame in order to serve the purpose of democratizing the middle east. Perhaps worst of all, the press gave them a nearly free pass out of laziness or fear. Hubris does for American arrogance in statecraft what Fiasco does for it in military planning and execution: it exposes both the sinews of American excess and the price that all of us will pay for it
Well-documented analysis of Bush's Iraq failure [Posted on 2008-07-19]
Highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to know how we ended up in the quagmire of Iraq in spite of Bush and his cabinet initially proclaiming going to war in Iraq would be quick and decisive, including Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld's famous quip to reporters that "we don't do quagmires."
This is a comprehensive, well-researched examination of why and how the Bush administration took the country down paths they said they would never go, how the internecine relationships in the Bush cabinet, and Bush's disengagement and dislike of real discussion of differing opinions, led to the war and its aftermath being controlled by ideological academics with little if any real world experience, while those with proven track records of success were shunted aside, often fired outright. You get a good look at how the chaotic mismanagement of U.S. decisions post-Sadaam destroyed the secular and moderate Iraqi establishment and infrastructure, leaving the country wide open to fanatics and terrorists from inside and out.
what we knew [Posted on 2008-10-31]
What we knew is too much.
Hubris explores, in depth, the situations that led up to the current Iraq War. While of course hindsight is 20/20, the lack of evidence for war is astonishing. A moral to take from this book is that if you really want to go to war, everything will point to evidence that your enemy is amassing WMDs. I hope we never elect officials so eager for battle as the ones depicted in Hubris.
The authors go through all the evidence that was brought to the American people on why going to war with Saddam was required. And basically all that evidence was bogus. And not just bogus in retrospect - people knew it was bogus then. What more, there was evidence that Saddam did NOT have a WMD program but that evidence was disregarded.
Who's to blame - the Whitehouse or the CIA? Well probably both, but the bulk of the blame must lie on the Whitehouse's doorstep. They wanted the war and CIA complied by not being judicious with the evidence.
An interesting tid bit:
Before the 2004 elections, it was realized that a 'surge' was needed but it was not implemented till after the 2004 elections because doing so earlier would admit to being ill-prepared for the war (isn't this reason enough to limit presidents to one term?).
I'd say about a third of the book is devoted to the Valerie Plame CIA leak. Needless to say there's too much information on it. A chapter would suffice. I think the whole affair was silly - the prosecution was looking for perjury charges and not charging for leaking classified material. So if Libby just admitted to leaking, he would not have had to go through the whole mess ( it's difficult to prosecute for intelligence leaks). So the leak case, I don't think is all that exciting to begin with.
Very interesting book. Really solidified my disapproval of the Iraq War. Would like to see a response though if there's one out there disagreeing.
Needs Editing and A Broader Perspective [Posted on 2008-11-03]
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.
Everything they didn't want you to know about Iraq, and were afraid you'd ask [Posted on 2008-11-17]
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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