PURCHASE

The Fall of the House of Bush
(PUBLISHED IN PAPERBACK AS AMERICAN ARMAGEDDON)

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:

• A very different depiction of the George W. Bush presidency than has ever been seen. Unger paints a portrait of Bush 43 as a radical evangelical enacting a vision of American exceptionalism shared by the Christian right, who see American destiny as ordained by God, and by neoconservative ideologues, who believe that America’s “greatness” is founded on “universal principles” that apply to all men and all nations—and give America the right to change the world.

• The real story of George W. Bush’s conversion experience. Conventional wisdom, as well as a recounting of the event by Bush himself in A Charge to Keep, has it that Bush became a born again Christian in the summer of 1985, after extended private talks with Reverend Billy Graham at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. In fact Bush had already been born again in Midland, Texas more than a year earlier thanks to preacher Arthur Blessit, whose evangelism was rooted in the Jesus movement of the Sixties counterculture. Unlike Graham, a distinguished public figure whose fame grew out of frequent visits to the Oval Office over several decades, Blessit is perhaps best known for preaching at concerts with the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and the like; for running a “Jesus coffee house” on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip for a flock that consisted of bikers, druggies, hippies, and two Mafia hit men; and for lugging a 12-foot-long cross for Jesus through 60 countries all over the world.

• The extraordinarily constrained relationship between Bush 41 and Bush 43 on the subject of Iraq as the crisis there continued to worsen in the spring of ’04. After putting together an administration full of his father’s worst enemies—Rumsfeld, a bitter rival for decades; the neocons, who had done battle with Bush senior as early as 1976 when he was head of the CIA; the Christian Right who the elder Bush referred to as the “extra-chromosome crowd”— George W. Bush not only reversed his dad’s policies in the Gulf and Middle East, he set about dismantling his legacy piece by piece. And yet the two men steadfastly refused to engage on the subject. Says Unger, “This is a father-son relationship with far more than just your run-of-the-mill oedipal problems and one that really affects the fate of nations.”

• Why Dick Cheney—neither an evangelical nor a neocon—stood out as the one single inscrutable figure who was vital to shaping the destiny of the Bush 41 administration. While the neocons dreamed of “democratizing” the entire Arab world, Cheney’s goal was to expand the powers of the executive branch. Unger explains how the vice president, with little fanfare, carried out what amounted to an executive coup. He shows how Cheney blew past the complex system of checks and balances designed to protect the electorate, how he effectively disabled the entire national security apparatus of the United States, and how he replaced it with a parallel national security apparatus—essentially a disinformation pipeline—that expressed the wished for reality of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neocons.

• Why Cheney wanted to have Paul Wolfowitz named to head the CIA when Bush 41 first took office. Unger reveals the behind-the-scenes story of how Wolfowitz’s alleged philandering may have caused him to lose the CIA appointment, how his wife, Clare Wolfowitz, reportedly intervened to thwart her estranged husband’s ascent, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld took extraordinary measures to make sure they had control over the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

• A detailed look at the Niger/Uranium/Yellowcake story. This entire affair still tends to be viewed as an intelligence failure and a series of administration mistakes and fumbles. Unger argues this was in fact an intelligence success—a successful black propaganda operation to help start the war. He traces the infamous Niger documents from the robbery of Niger’s embassy in Rome, through Italian intelligence, to the various places they were dispersed in an attempt to make it appear the information in the documents was coming from multiple sources. (Among the many people Unger interviewed on the record for the book are nine current or former top intelligence officials from the CIA, DIA and Pentagon who are all convinced the forged Niger documents were part of a successful propaganda “psy-op” effort.)

• A comprehensive account of how the neocons went down to Austin long before Bush was even nominated and took over the foreign policy seminars to “educate” him, in the process pushing aside the realists in his father’s camp. Unger details the semi-secret trips to the governor’s mansion in Texas by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams in late 1998 and early ’99 as Bush’s key advisers began putting together his roadmap to the White House. It was here—with Condoleezza Rice, a supposed realist actually serving as an enabler—that the neocons finally saw George W. as someone they could get behind. Eager to break out of the deep shadows cast by his dad (he was hardly the favorite son among the four Bush boys), he was the perfect blank slate for the neocons, ripe for plucking. Unger writes, “Bush’s desire to distinguish himself from his father happened to coincide with the neoconservatives’ long held dreams of remaking the entire Middle East.” He also makes clear that the genesis of the war began long before the 2000 presidential campaign was well under way.

• The definitive behind-the-scenes story of Colin Powell’s preparation for his historic presentation at the United Nations in February 2003. Here we see Powell’s team, headed by longtime assistant, Larry Wilkerson, grappling with the realization that the evidence confirming Saddam’s WMD program came from the vice president’s office rather than from the CIA itself—a stunning breech of intelligence protocol—and that very little of it was standing up to the light of day. We also see Powell’s frustration as he tries to fend off the administration’s relentless attempts to reinsert into the presentation spurious allegations about an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection that he personally had discarded. Unger writes, “On occasion Powell got so angry at such tactics that at times he threw the dossier up in the air. ‘This is bullshit,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing this.’” Says Unger, “It’s hard to believe Powell didn’t know the books had been cooked by the administration. Yet he went ahead and lent his sterling reputation to the project – in the process becoming the best salesman on the planet for the neocons.”

• The definitive account of the thirty-year fight against the national security apparatus in which the neocons manipulated intelligence in order to implement hard-line militarist policies. Unger tells the full story of “Team B”—a group of hawkish anti-Communist foreign policymakers that challenged the CIA on its analysis of the threat posed by the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. It’s an eerie foreshadowing of the manipulations that will be used by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (a member of Team B), and the neocons to sell the Iraq war several decades later. The author also delves into the abiding neocon preoccupation with Israel and the links that tie together the Israeli Right, Orthodox Jews, the neocons and the Christian Right.

• The fruits of Unger’s undercover investigative reporting with Tim LaHaye—author of the apocalyptic Left Behind series of thrillers—that will provide secular Americans with a look at the astonishing theology he espouses that has been widely embraced in the evangelical Christian community. In May 2005, Unger joined a group of about ninety evangelical tourists—people who could pass for a random selection culled from almost any shopping mall in America—as they traveled the Holy Land with LaHaye on a “Walking Where Jesus Walked” tour. A particularly stunning moment comes when some in the group, while touring the ancient fortress city of Megiddo, Israel, reflect on how much blood will fill the surrounding Jezreel Valley when the two and a half billion people who have not accepted Christ as their savior are slaughtered after the Rapture. When will this happen? According to one of the bible tourists, the answer is “Not soon enough.” As Unger puts it, “In their unquestioning religiosity…they seem stunningly oblivious to the genocidal nature of the [Left Behind] series’ theology.”

• The deeply rooted history of American evangelicalism. Unger looks at the fundamentalism of the Puritan settlers; the colonial-era split between religious conservatives and the post-Enlightenment founding fathers; the dramatic changes that swept American evangelicalism in the last half of the nineteenth century; and the Christian Right’s disengagement from formal national politics after the embarrassment of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

• A look at the development—virtually unnoticed in the secular world—of a vast infrastructure of Christian colleges and Bible institutes, magazines, broadcast outlets, crusades to convert the unsaved, and thousands of new churches in the decades after the Scopes trial. Slowly, quietly, the religious right was accumulating enough clout to forge an extraordinarily powerful movement.

• How the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade brought the Christian Right out of its post-Scopes Monkey Trial defensive crouch and launched it as a populist right-wing religious movement. From the establishment of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition to the agenda setting works of theologian authors like Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHaye, Unger charts the evolution of the modern day values movement as the wall dividing politics and the pulpit came down. He shows how a new generation of Christian political strategists borrowed from their secularist foes to build their own road map for amassing political power. And he charts the alliances between evangelicals and hard line Republicans.

• The birth of neoconservatism in response to the Sixties counterculture and the Vietnam era antiwar movement. Unger looks at the key roles played by people like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, two of neoconservatism’s founding fathers; Albert Wohlstetter who taught the proto neocons how to turn their ideas into political action (and was said to have been the model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove); and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the self-described “muscular democrat” whose staunch Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union attracted young neocons. Unger follows five young neocons on Jackson’s staff—Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz—who went on to become key figures in George W. Bush’s War in Iraq and the grand neoconservative strategy to “democratize” the Middle East.

• An account of the New Right’s highly successful, multibillion-dollar effort—bankrolled by billionaire philanthropists—to completely reframe the entire national debate about tax policy, the economy, welfare, judiciary, foreign policy, national security, and more. Unger shows how the neocons created a chain of new think tanks and lobbying groups (and funded existing ones) in the 1980s and ‘90s with ideologues of various stripes taking key positions as “scholars” and “experts”; how they built up and seized editorial power at scores of media operations; and how they created an elaborate institutional infrastructure that could sustain itself for generations to come.

• A look at the New Right’s domestic war against reason and science. From the Bush administration’s insistence (in the face of all evidence) that global warming is a hoax to the banning of “morning after” contraceptive sales despite FDA approval; from the establishment of a Creation Museum in Ohio to the availability of creationist tours to the Grand Canyon; from attempts to bring the teaching of intelligent design into science classrooms to the alleged doctoring of a National Cancer Institute fact sheet to suggest that abortion increases breast cancer risk, Unger reflects on the various ways in which the radical right still seems able drive America as never before.

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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