HUBRIS: The Reviews Are In
Yesterday, both The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World weighed in on Hubris: The Inside Story, of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War--and did so in positive fashion. Here are some excerpts.
The Post review by Martin Kettle, a former U.S. bureau chief of the Guardian newspaper (and a fellow I don't know), wrote:
There have been many books about the Iraq war, and there will be many others before we are through. This one, however, pulls together with unusually shocking clarity the multiple failures of process and statecraft that led so many people to persuade themselves that the evidence pointed to an active Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction and that it was in the interests of the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
This is seemingly an eternal theme. The deeper we are drawn into Isikoff and Corn's account, the more we enter March of Folly territory. When the late Barbara W. Tuchman published her masterly 1984 account of the ruinous policies that governments have pursued through the ages, she ranged across a canvas stretching from the Trojan war to Vietnam.
To qualify as folly, Tuchman wrote, a policy must meet three criteria: It must have been seen at the time as counterproductive; a feasible alternative course of action must have been available; and the policy must have been that of a group of people, not merely a single tyrant or ruler. If ever a policy qualifies on all counts, it was the U.S.-imposed regime change in Iraq. Isikoff and Corn are reporters (for Newsweek and the Nation, respectively), not historians, but they still compel the reader to confront a further, essential dimension of folly's march.
In each case -- the Niger uranium papers, the mobile labs, the aluminum tubes, the Atta-Iraq link -- there were people up and down the policy chain, including some at the very top, who either knew at the time or should have known that the claims were false or unreliable.
Many critics of the Iraq War have highlighted the ideological drive behind the invasion. Fewer have grappled with the more complex question of why it was impossible for skeptics, doubters and more scrupulous analysts to stop it. Isikoff and Corn enable us to understand better how this devastating policy tragedy played out. But as Coleridge once observed, the light of experience is but a lantern on the stern, illuminating only the waters through which we have passed. Sadly, Isikoff and Corn can't tell the next generation how to avoid such tragedies.
Sorry, we couldn't tell folks how to do so. But being compared to Tuchman's March of Folly is quite an honor.
In The New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn, who is writing a book on the neocons and whom I also don't know, noted,
In "Hubris," Michael Isikoff and David Corn chronicle the Bush administration's delusional march to war. Though there has been a deluge of works denouncing the follies of the military and the administration, Isikoff and Corn cover somewhat different terrain. They offer the most comprehensive account of the White House's political machinations, aimed at convincing Congress and the public that Iraq posed a dire threat...The authors, who have interviewed key politicians and government officials, supply a lot of new information. They show that in many ways the administration became the dupe of its own propaganda.
Heilbrunn says "the book makes for fascinating reading." But he slaps us for an "obsessive focus on Judith Miller and The New York Times, as well as on the story of Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame and Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby." But more than one friend has quipped that being criticized in the Times for criticizing the Times is not all that bad. In any event, check out the full reviews yourself and--if you haven't already--please buy the book and enjoy what I hear is a "fascinating read" of "shocking clarity."
Posted by David Corn at October 16, 2006 11:08 AM
