I feel like I have been on an overdose of these books just having read House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger - the biggest tell all blockbuster (my opinion), The Choice by Zbigniew Brzezinski (an excellent analysis), Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony of Survival (truly a book that makes one think), Thirty Days (about Tony Blair) by Peter Stothard, and Price of Loyalty by Paul O'Neill (excellent book), Why America Slept by Gerald Posner, the very popular best seller Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke, and the Rise of the Vulcans by Mann and Mann. I put together a "listmania" list of the 25 best books - the best books - mainly non political taken together, no strong bias conservative or liberal - a spectrum of opinion when you take them all together.

Many of the books are "gotcha" books that link Bush with some wrong doings or alternately books like Brzezinski that lay out solutions. This book is a bit different. It is more of a chronological history, and the book has been highly acclaimed by the Economist, NY Times etc. After reading I can see why.

I started to read the present book and was unable to put it down until I had read it virtually cover to cover. It is a surprisingly good book and neutral in tone and a compelling read - for myself it was a page turner. It brings together the story of Iraq and WMD's in chronological order (all briefly). It starts with the Bush campaign and what he says in his run for the presidency regarding foreign policy, his philosophy, the team that he put together, plus the authors put in some historical perspective starting with Washington, then Wilson, Truman, etc. It then works its way through pre and post 9-11, Afghanistan and Iraq until late 2003.

Surprisingly I found that this book is in almost complete agreement with some of the more recent "tell all" books (Blix, O'Neill, Clarke), and I would strongly recommend reading this book. The overlying theme or conclusion is that the intelligence was flawed and incomplete. Like the Hans Blix book there were no WMD's in Iraq. The Iraq war was pushed by Wolfowitz and others prior to 9-11, and can best be described as a distraction or even an incitement of Muslims towards anti-Amercian feelings. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan lacked realistic follow up plans for the post military invasion. So those conflicts still remain unresolved. Also, the more serious threats of Iran and North Korea remain almost unsolvable due to the potential negative consequences of a military solution for those cases including the threat of North Korea dropping nuclear weapons on South Korea.

An excellent book and I highly recommend.

Jack in Toronto


Interesting thesis, objective setting out of facts   March 2, 2004
 8 out of 10 found this review helpful

This is a thoughtful and generally objective assessment of the impact of Bush Jr on the foreign policy of the United States. The central thesis that runs through the book is that Bush Jr has had a fairly consistent set of foreign policy objectives that were modified by the events of 11 September 2001 - but modified within the existing guidelines. More broadly, the authors see Bush Jr’s objectives as in the foreign arena as drawing from some of the purposefulness evident in domestic policy in his first eight months in office (when, of course, foreign policy was subordinate to domestic aims, but still followed an “America first” rather than a multilateral approach).

The analysis concludes with warnings about the dangers of Bush Jr’s approach, and implies that the administration has not learned the lessons it should have taken away from fighting an enemy that is not a state in the traditional sense. The criticism of the lack of planning for the post Afghan and post Iraq conflict environments is an area of particular emphasis - with the undertone that, in a conflict where “nation-building” is essential if military objectives are to be met long term, multilateralism is critical to the success of operations. Hints of “imperial overstretch” creep into the debate here.

The book sets out the background and provides supporting evidence extremely well. For a dual authored piece, Daalder and Lindsay have managed to come up with an extremely readable book, written in a comfortably informal style with (one suspects) the odd appearance of a rather dry humour coming in. The authors are former Clinton staffers, but objectivity is not particularly damaged. The bias, it appears to me, is a strong support for the position of the now rather isolated Secretary of State, Colin Powell. There is no “knee-jerk” analysis depicting Bush Jr as a buffoon, or as a slave to sinister neo-con forces in the administration, and the authors skilfully point out that to characterise Bush Jr in such a way is to misunderstand his Presidency. It would have been nice if there was slightly more examination of the US’s perception by other countries under the new Bush Doctrine - for instance, if the US sees itself as a “liberator” of Iraq (which it must as part of the Bush Doctrine), it must see all attacks on itself in Iraq as the work of Baathists, Al-Qaeda and so on (as they can be the only opponents of “liberation“). However, if Iraqis do not share the same world view as Bush Jr, these attacks are potentially legitimised (Iraq’s experience with Western incursions into its territory have rarely categorised the incoming authority as a provider of “liberty” or freedom, as the British experiences in the inter-war period demonstrate only too clearly). Bush Jr’s failure to pursue multilateral support because of the absolute belief in the righteousness of the Bush Doctrine could be a major problem, if other areas of the world hold different but still legitimate interpretations of liberty. This is an area which leads out from Daalder and Lindsay’s work, and would probably benefit from further study.