HUBRIS: A Book Review

I bought this book for my father, a staunch Republican and Bush man, and was floored to hear his response after reading it. He was in complete agreement with the authors' assessment that the Bush administration and other neo-cons took us to war on some very flimsy premises simply to extend their questionable political vision to an angry and unstable Middle East that is ill-equipped to deal with free-market democracy and Western influence. My father was a lifelong and high-ranking member of military intelligence and has followed Middle Eastern issues through military publications, books and journals since the mid-1960s. He has no illusions about what took place, and this book only confirmed it for him.

Bush and the hawks in his administration used 9/11 and the fear of terrorist attacks as a tool to justify an invasion that they'd had on their agenda since their first days in office. This isn’t conjecture, by the way... it’s a well-known fact by now. The problem arose in trying to tie Iraq and Saddam Hussein to bin Laden and his terrorist organization. The evidence was flimsy, and they knew it. In spite of the glaring lack of evidence, they forged ahead anyway, scrutinizing mounds of raw intelligence in the hope that something would rear its head and provide them with enough “scare” value to garner support for the war. They found three questionable leads, and rode them (as well as a few other notable ones) all the way into battle: the claim that Saddam was trying to import yellow-cake uranium from Niger, the purchase of aluminum tubes that were said to be used in making a nuclear reactor, and the claim that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had at one point made contact with an Iraqi intelligence official. All three claims turned out to be false leads, and this was known well before going to war. But the Bush administration pushed on anyway because, as noted, they’d already made up their minds. What has happened since is history, and I suspect it won’t be kind to President Bush, particularly when he seems to view the deaths of many thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children as “a comma” in the history of the Middle East.

The war in Iraq is a very "modern" war, at least for America...a war where the military is being used to some degree as a tool of the super-rich and super-powerful (and possibly super-arrogant, although I hate to believe that) to effect economic, political and ideological change in a region of the world where the neo-cons felt it necessary to preserve American access to resources and supply chains beneficial to American interests. It was also done as a means to establish a strong foothold in the heart of the Arab world (one conveniently located next door to Iran). To achieve these ends, they had to sell the American people on an unnecessary war by appealing to our deepest fears, rather than simply being honest with us. In their rush to arms, they overlooked sound but contrary intelligence, built their case on shaky and unsubstantiated intelligence, and saw terrorists behind every palm tree where others saw nothing at all.

What's most interesting about this book is that it's not a partisan hachet-job. A large number of the sources cited within the book were members of the administration, or friendly to it. Their current view of the war is offered in hindsight and reflection; it's honest, but a bit too late to make any difference. The book is aptly titled. If you only read a handful of books on the buildup and fallout of the Iraq war, make sure this is one of them.