The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the...

The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, ... | Craig Unger | he gets it right

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The Fall of the Ho...

	The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, ... Craig Unger Scribner, 2007 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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A deeply important book

This book is astonishing
it shows in rivetting detail the perfect storm that arose from the following 4 factors:
George W. Bush's life-long feeling of living in his father's shadow
The forward march of the right (particularly the neocons) in terms of institutions, media, think tanks and the political and elite circles in particular.
The Rove strategy of allying the GOP to the evangelical movement to create a permanent Republican revolution

The coallescing of the previous 3 factors in allowing the GOP to view the younger Bush as their saviour (having been gravely disappointed by his father the 41st president) because he so convinced the various evangelicals that he met that he was the real deal (and he was).

it is a sober book, it's very well written (in the style of a very good Vanity Fair article which of course Unger co-edits) it makes its case really well and as you read it, since it's such recent history, you find every outrage detailed in there (except curiously the scandal of the sacking of the federal judges). I was nodding my head thinking, yep, I remember this, yep this too, and this etc...
I was very surprised that it was so up to date that it even had the phony incident in which the Pentagon tried to suggest that Iranian dinghies in the gulf had tried to 'suicide' attack the American fleet..As if!

Unger is a serious commentator and I think it's fair to say that he views the grand sweep of history through the psychological analysis of the various characters involved rather than say 'powerful forces that shape history'. He makes a very convincing case that it's the neocons rather than anything else who are driving America's disastrous Bush 43 administration. The key characters come out looking deeply flawed.

The two biggest villains are Rumsfeld and especially Dick Cheney.
A third foe that emerges even though he never really spells it out, is the US mainstream media. In plenty of asides, he makes a subtle point along the lines of "it escapes me ...it mystifies me why the US media did not pick up on this." This is naive in the extreme, but I'm not going to bleat on about this, he's clearly a creature of the media himself and he probably does not want to make his book unreviewable.

Two unexpected heroes emerge from the book, Bush snr and his lifelong friend and advisor Brent Scowcroft.

I learned a great deal by reading this book and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who instinctively wondered how the Bush 43 cabal created such a horrific mess of their 2 [illegal] terms.

There are plenty of fascinating footnotes in this book, and they are well worth reading too.

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he gets it right

I've been to Iraq many times. Unger gets it right. Good read. If you're on the Right and love Bush you'll hate it. Lefties will be reassured. The Middle will learn how we were conned. And why we shouldn't have been.

NEOCONS INVASION OF THE GOVENMENT

This book made it clear to me how the neocons managed to infiltrate the highest reaches of our government. George W Bush is not as dumb as he appears to be, he is intellectually lazy. What better way for the neocons to take over the government than to use him as a patsy and get their ideals into law. The foremost of those ideals is that "the end justifies the means". This is diametrically opposed to what I have always thought of an American value.
I am grateful to Unger for this clear and succinct account of Bush's psyche
and the workings of the Neocon movement.
I think everyone should read this if only to know what's happening in our country.

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unger vs. unger

unger is so eager to make a point, he constantly paints the world in black and white terms and, as a result, he constantly contradicts himself. In the House of Bush, Poppy Bush views "the horrific photos of Iranian soldiers whose bodies had been burned by chemical weapons" as "a delicate public relations problem rather than a moral issue." In this newest text, Poppy Bush good, Baby Bush bad. And Kissinger, known to be responsible for installing military dictatorships throughout Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Argentinia) and the deaths of more than fifty thousand civilians, is suddenly "good" in contrast to the evil neoconservatives.

lots of interesting facts but these need to be separated from unger's off-the-wall opinions.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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