The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/10/arts/07book.php

Book Review: Under a microscope, Bush and his presidency

By Michiko Kakutani Published: December 10, 2007

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. By Craig Unger. 437 pages. $27. Scribner.


The story of how the Bush administration took the United States to war in Iraq is such a complicated tale with so many plots and subplots, so much misinformation and spin, so many missteps and outrageous misjudgments that reporters in countless newspaper and magazine articles, television documentaries and dozens of books have struggled to piece together the narrative. It is a continuing process, as more and more information comes to light and needs to be sifted and weighed and connected.

While Bob Woodward gave us, in a series of three books, a broad account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, week by week, month by month (based largely on the testimony of administration insiders and other firsthand sources), investigative reporters like Seymour M. Hersh, Jane Mayer, Dana Priest, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau have shed a fierce light on hidden aspects of the administration's war on terror, including its misuse of intelligence, its embrace of aggressive interrogation methods and its covert surveillance programs at home. Legal experts like Charlie Savage, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq have explicated the Bush White House's efforts to expand the power of the executive branch, while military reporters like Thomas E. Ricks have chronicled the administration's disastrous mismanagement of the war in Iraq.

In his new book, "The Fall of the House of Bush," the reporter Craig Unger (the author of the 2004 book "House of Bush, House of Saud") attempts to turn an all-encompassing, wide-angle lens on the Bush presidency, looking at the rise of George W. Bush and his support from the religious right; his relationship with his father, George H. W. Bush, and its impact on foreign policy; the alliance between Israeli hard-liners and Christian Zionists, and the neoconservatives' push for the war against Iraq; the administration's use of flawed intelligence before the invasion; and Vice President Dick Cheney's efforts to expand executive power. The resulting book is a sprawling hodgepodge of the persuasive and the speculative, the well researched and the hastily assembled, the original and the highly derivative.

Among the assertions that Unger makes in this book are that Cheney initially wanted Paul D. Wolfowitz (who as deputy defense secretary became one of the chief architects of the war against Iraq) to be made head of the CIA, a plan that was supposedly derailed because of Wolfowitz's marital indiscretions, which would later play a role in his downfall at the World Bank. Unger also suggests that Bush did not become a born-again Christian after talking with the Rev. Billy Graham at the Bush compound in the summer of 1985, as the president recounted in his autobiography, but that he'd already been born again, more than a year earlier in Texas, thanks to an evangelical preacher named Arthur Blessit. Blessit, says Unger, once ran a "Jesus coffeehouse" on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, where he preached to "bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men."