How the Neocon-Christian Right Alliance Brought Down the House of Bush

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted November 21, 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to investigative journalist Craig Unger in Washington, D.C., here with Democracy Now! He is author of the new book The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future. The book examines how neoconservatives secretly forged an alliance with the Christian Right during the Bush presidency and helped make the case for war in Iraq. Craig Unger is the contributing editor at Vanity Fair, also author of the book House of Bush, House of Saud.

Craig, welcome to Democracy Now!

CRAIG UNGER: Thanks for having me, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don't you start off by laying out the thesis of this book.

CRAIG UNGER: Well, I think when most people look at the Middle East conflict today, they frame it in terms of Islam versus the West. I want to try looking at a new paradigm, and that is, I want to examine fundamentalisms, and by that I mean not just Islamic fundamentalism, but Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, as well. And I really throw in neoconservatism as sort of a secular form of fundamentalism, which are in conflict with a modern post-Enlightenment world. And I think that’s a larger conflict that has gotten us into trouble today in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about President Bush, President George W. Bush's relationship with George H.W. Bush, a central theme that runs through The Fall of the House of Bush.

CRAIG UNGER: Right. Well, you may have seen there have been a raft of stories recently that they have a very congenial relationship. Last summer, the New York Times had them playing horseshoes out in Kennebunkport, Maine. And on the surface, I think that’s the case. I interviewed Bob Strauss, for example, who had been chairman of the National Democratic Party. He was a friend of Bush Sr.’s and had been ambassador to Moscow when the elder George Bush was president. And he said that when he had dinner with the two men, they would just be gossiping, talking about, “Oh, how’s Susie doing in Midland, Texas?” and so on.

But under the surface, I think there’s a real very deep conflict that has affected millions of lives, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and they represent almost polar opposite points of view. I call the first chapter in my book “Oedipus Tex.” And if you look at the current Bush administration, you realize he has put together an administration consisting of some of his father's worst enemies. For example, his father was a very congenial man, had very few bitter enemies, but one of them was certainly Donald Rumsfeld. In addition, his father had very little -- was not terribly fond of the Christian Right, and at one point he called them the “extra chromosome crowd,” a remark for which he had to apologize.

And finally, his father had been doing battle with the neoconservatives as early as 1976. If you go back to that period, Bush Sr. was then head of the CIA, and you see the young neocons then had put together what was known as Team B, and they began to challenge the CIA’s intelligence on the Cold War. This was the era of detente. They were saying the CIA was a bunch of liberals who were being soft on the Soviet Union. And they tried to come up -- they began to politicize intelligence and distort it and come up with a much tougher line. And in there I think you see a lot of the foreshadowing of the events we're going through today.

AMY GOODMAN: As we talk about how President Bush and Vice President Cheney made the case for war in Iraq, I want to turn to comments made by Dick Cheney in September of 1992. At the time, he was President George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. During an address at the Economic Club of Detroit, Cheney was asked why the United States didn’t bury Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. This is how he responded close to fifteen years ago.

DICK CHENEY: At the end of the war in the Gulf, when we made the decision to stop, we did so because we had achieved our military objectives -- that is, when we decided to halt military operations. Those objectives were twofold: to liberate Kuwait and, secondly, to strip Saddam Hussein of his offensive military capability, of his capacity to threaten his neighbors. And we had done that.

There is no doubt in my mind, but what we could have gone on to Baghdad and taken Baghdad, occupied the whole country. We had the 101st Airborne up on the Euphrates River Valley about halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. And I don’t think, from a military perspective, that it would have been an impossible task. Clearly, it wouldn’t, given the forces that we had there.

But we made a very conscious decision not to proceed for several reasons, in part because as soon as you go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein, you have to recognize that you’re undertaking a fairly complex operation. It’s not the kind of situation where we could have pulled up in front of the presidential palace in Baghdad and said, “Come on, Saddam. You’re going to the slammer.” We would have had to run him to ground. A lot of places he could have gone to hide out or to resist. It would have required extensive military forces to achieve that.

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Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

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