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
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The presidency of George W. Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told.
From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud, comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day.
Among the powerful revelations in this book:
• Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war.
• How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will.
• How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq.
• Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored.
• How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq.
• How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformation pipeline to mislead America and start the war.
A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran.
Provocative, timely, and disturbing, The Fall of the House of Bush stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unger's follow up to House of Bush, House of Saud tracks George W. Bush's ascent to power, helped by Christian fundamentalists and neoconservative policymakers who themselves rise to unprecedented influence in Washington after years in the political wilderness. Bush embraces both groups with the fervor of a new convert-and with, Unger claims, devastating results on America's foreign policy. This is an exhaustively chronicled but by now familiar story of the Bush presidency, and Unger revels in the details, especially the Byzantine backstabbing and emasculation of Colin Powell and Condelezza Rice by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the tensions between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr.'s inner circles. In Unger's narrative, the Iraq War emerges as a fait accompli in search of an appropriate trigger, provided by September 11 and the alleged weapons of mass destruction. The historical nuggets surrounding the rise of the neocons and the Christian right are intriguing, and Unger includes some eyebrow raising revelations, but overall he leaves readers who have been awake for the past seven years with that "it's deja; vu all over again" feeling.
