First there was 9/11. Then President George Bush and his administration decided to take revenge by publicly linking Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq and formerly an ally of the United States, to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City, thus serving as the pretext for the Iraq War, which began in 2003, and continued on for more than a decade.
Written by award winning journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn, “Hubris” focuses on that campaign, which was based largely on deception. 9/11 had happened recently, and the American people were out for blood. So the Bush administration threw them a bone by alleging that Saddam Hussein had ties to the 9/11 terrorists if not direct knowledge of the attack beforehand, and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The government, that is, branded Hussein a national security threat as an excuse, later proved without merit, for going to war.
America’s excursion into Iraq was costly, both in terms of human lives and money. “Hubris,” so-called because of the Bush Administration’s overwhelming confidence that their ruse would work, describes how such an arrogant stunt cost at least 190,000 lives, mostly civilian, and some $2.2 trillion in U.S. taxpayer money. The administration was already determined to go to war with Iraq. They simply needed to make the case to the American public.
The book also explores a world of intrigue – Iraqi agents meeting with al-Qaeda operatives in Prague, Iraqi spies and defectors, including one codenamed Curveball, a CIA-supported, convicted embezzler and member of the Iraqi National Congress named Ahmed Chalabi, a scandal involving dubious information from an intelligence source out of Italy alleging that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, and that it had, therefore, illegally revived the nuclear program the international community had forced it to terminate in the 1990s. U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson went to that country to investigate the claims, but later refuted them. To compound things, a reporter outed his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent.
And that merely skims the surface.
“Hubris” is a riveting book and, indeed, another one about corrupt politicians spinning a web of lies to influence the American public. It’s very well-written and informative, thorough and thought-provoking. One could even dub it a Greek tragedy clothed in the ungodly accouterments of political Americana, its actors intoxicated on that poisonous nectar called hubris.
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