Hubris (Book Review) · 28 April, 08:52 PM
I’ve just finished reading Hubris
by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, which comes with the subtitle “The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War”. Isikoff and Corn start in September 2002, at a White House briefing for Congressional leaders, and end with the resignation of I. Lewis Libby some 3 years later. It’s quite an amazing book in its coverage of the public relations behind the case for war. Early on, the authors describe how the White House use of the press (notably NY Times) results in this feedback loop where White House would leak to the media and then cite articles based on those leaked reports in building support for the war. There’s also a great deal of coverage of Judith Miller’s often errant reporting and its role in escalating the hype around the supposed Iraqi WMD programs.
The authors take some time to describe dissent from within the Republican party, most notably Dick Armey, at the time the #2 Republican in the House of Representatives, who had serious misgivings about the war. It occured to me that frustration with the Bush Administration might have been part of the reason Armey didn’t seek re-election in 2003. The book doesn’t say as much, but between the foreign policy and fiscal policy, Armey would seem to be a bad fit with the Bush administration.
It’s also a story about intelligence, and the procurement of it. The authors describe several specific incidents where the use of torture results in bad intelligence. Dissent within the intelligence community got lost in the beauracracy, and George Tenet was certainly to blame for some of that. The authors contend that the environment was not so much about Administration pressure to produce favorable intelligence as about Administration bias to read intelligence in most favorable light. CIA staffers certainly felt some of that pressure, but the Vice President also had created his own staff of amateur intelligence analysts reading raw data provided by the NSA, and producing its own analysis for the President. It’s actually quite stunning to see how the Federal bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own, and how certain elements within the bureaucracy were able to exert undue influence through simple persistence. The White House’s overall lack of faith in the CIA culminates in the Valerie Wilson affair, which consumes a great deal of the last half of the book.
Hubris is ultimately a damning book on many fronts. In the end, nobody looks good. People who had opportunities to stand on principle usually didn’t: Colin Powell completely trashing his reputation before the UN, or George Tenet silently looking away as dissent within the CIA and Energy Department was pushed aside during the creation of the National Intelligence Estimate. By the end, even victims like Joe and Valerie Wilson start to look like opportunists and opportunists like Judith Miller start to look like victims.
— Gordon Weakliem
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