Customer Reviews

Going to War: How Misinformation, Disinformation, and Arrogance Led America into Iraq

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That George W. Bush wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein from day one there is no doubt. It was, after all, the lament of every conservative that his father and General Powell had put on the brakes 40 miles from Baghdad in 1991. The need to finish the job was a barroom and boardroom commonplace. 9/11 fueled the fear, the rage, and the reason to get them before they get us.

That Bush 2 was careless about who "them" was is historical fact, as is the falsity of his rationale - weapons of mass destruction. But how were Congress, the British, and the public brought along? The simple answer, like Robert Redford said in The Sting, is "he cheats". Yes, says the victim, but How does he do it? Russ Hoyle shows how. And it is a much more complicated tale than I for one thought.

Under the microscope Bush does not appear as the puppet of Cheney or Rumsfeld or both. Rather he is a major actor himself - buying into Blair's high road strategy - WMD as justification, and Colin Powell's concurrence that a UN vote was needed for legitimacy. The decision to follow the WMD/UN strategy greatly complicated the effort to mount the campaign against Saddam Hussein's regime. And greatly frustrated Cheney and Rumsfeld.

In the end the most important element may have been that the desire to take action, the belief that bad actors do bad things, led to the conclusion that possibility was probability, that fear was more important than fact. In that process the Director of the CIA knuckled under, contrary evidence was spurned, Congress trusted the untrustworthy, and the press was largely tricked and trapped into giving George Bush the free ride to Baghdad from which it will take us a generation to recover.

But a generation won't be long enough unless we learn the lessons of the necessity for independent political intelligence, and independence of judgment that are the teaching of Going to War, the only really necessary book if you want to know how we went to war in Iraq.