Books > Fall of the House of Bush >

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE

Oedipus Tex

It was a cool, crisp day in the spring of 2004 -- a rarity for Houston -- and George H.W. Bush chatted with a friend in his office suite on Memorial Drive. Tall and trim, his hair graying but by no means white, the former president was a few weeks shy of his eightieth birthday -- it would take place on June 12, to be exact -- and he was racing toward that milestone with the vigor of a man thirty years younger. In addition to golf, tennis, horseshoes, and his beloved Houston Astros, Bush's near-term calendar was filled with dates for fishing for Coho salmon in Newfoundland, crossing the Rockies by train, and trout fishing in the River Test in Hampshire, England. He still prowled the corridors of power from London to Beijing. He still lectured all over the world. And, as if that weren't enough, he was planning to commemorate his eightieth with a star-studded two-day extravaganza, culminating with him skydiving from thirteen thousand feet over his presidential library in College Station, Texas. All the celebratory fervor, however, could not mask one dark cloud on the horizon. The presidency of his son, George W. Bush, was imperiled.

One way of examining the growing crisis could be found in the prism of the elder Bush's relationship with his son, a relationship fraught with ancient conflicts, ideological differences, and their profound failure to communicate with each other. On many levels, the two men were polar opposites with completely different belief systems. An old-line Episcopalian, Bush 41 had forged an alliance with Christian evangelicals during the 1988 presidential campaign because it was vital to winning the White House. But the truth was that real evangelicals had always regarded him with suspicion -- and he had returned the sentiment.

But Bush 43 was different. A genuine born-again Christian himself, he had given hundreds of evangelicals key positions in the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and various federal agencies. How had it come to pass that after four generations of Bushes at Yale, the family name now meant that progress, science, and evolution were out and stopping embryonic stem cell research was in? Why was his son turning back the hands of time to the days when Creationism held sway?

But this was nothing compared to the Iraq War and the men behind it. George H.W. Bush was a genial man with few bitter enemies, but his son had managed to appoint, as secretary of defense no less, one of the very few who fit the bill -- Donald Rumsfeld. Once Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney took office, the latter supposedly a loyal friend, they had brought in one neoconservative policy maker after another to the Pentagon, the vice president's office, and the National Security Council. In some cases, these were the same men who had battled the elder Bush when he was head of the CIA in 1976. These were the same men who fought him when he decided not to take down Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War. Their goal in life seemed to be to dismantle his legacy.

Which was exactly what was happening -- with his son playing the starring role. A year earlier, President George W. Bush, clad in fighter-pilot regalia, strode triumphantly across the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, a "Mission Accomplished" banner at his back -- the Iraq War presumably won. But the giddy triumphalism of Operation Shock and Awe had quickly faded. America had failed to form a stable Iraqi government. With Baghdad out of control, sectarian violence was on the rise. U.S. soldiers were becoming occupiers rather than liberators. Coalition forces were torturing prisoners. As for Saddam's vast stash of weapons of mass destruction -- the stated reason for the invasion -- none had been found.

Bush 41 had always told his son that it was fine to take different political positions than he had held. If you have to run away from me, he said, I'll understand. Few things upset him. But there were limits. He was especially proud of his accomplishments during the 1991 Gulf War, none more so than his decision, after defeating Saddam in Kuwait, to refrain from marching on Baghdad to overthrow the brutal Iraqi dictator. Afterward, he wrote about it with coauthor Brent Scowcroft, his national security adviser, in A World Transformed, asserting that taking Baghdad would have incurred "incalculable human and political costs," alienated allies, and transformed Americans from liberators into a hostile occupying power, forced to rule Iraq with no exit strategy. His own son's folly had confirmed his wisdom, he felt.

But now his son had not only reversed his policies, he had taken things a step further. "The stakes are high...." the younger Bush told reporters on April 21. "And the Iraqi people are looking -- they're looking at America and saying, are we going to cut and run again?"

The unspoken etiquette of the Oval Office was that sitting and former presidents did not attack one another. "Cut and run" was precisely the phrase Bush 43 used to taunt his Democratic foes, but this time he had used it to take a swipe at his old man.

Having returned recently from the Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, the elder Bush was eagerly looking forward to his celebrity-studded birthday bash in June. But, to his dismay, the media didn't miss his son's slight of him. On CNN, White House correspondent John King characterized the president's speech as an apparent "criticism of his father's choice at the end of the first Gulf War." Thanks to a raft of election season books, the press was asking questions about whether there was a rift between father and son.

So on that brisk spring day, a friend of Bush 41's dropped by the Memorial Drive offices and asked the former president how he felt about his son's controversial remarks. The elder Bush was stoic and taciturn as usual. But it was clear that he was not merely insulted or offended -- his son's remark had struck at the very heart of his pride. "I don't know what the hell that's about," George H.W. Bush said, "but I'm going to find out. Scowcroft is calling him right now."

The battle lines between father and son had been drawn even before the Iraq War started -- a discreet, sub-rosa conflict that was both deeply personal and profoundly political. In the balance hung policies that would kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people, create millions of refugees, destabilize a volatile region that contained the largest energy deposits on the planet, and change the geostrategic balance of power for years to come.

Ultimately, it was the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history -- one that could result in the end of American global supremacy.

The two men shared overlapping rŽsumŽs -- schooling at Andover and Yale, membership in Skull and Bones, and an affinity for Texas and the oil business. But that's about where the similarities end. From the privileged confines of Greenwich, Connecticut, where he was raised, to Walker's Point, the Bush family summer compound in Kennebunkport where his family golfed and ate lobster on the rugged Maine coast, to the posh River Oaks section of Houston after they settled in Texas, George H.W. Bush epitomized a blue-blooded, old money, Eastern establishment ethos that was abhorrent to the Bible Belt. By contrast, his son had been a fish out of water among the Andover and Yale elite, and scurried back to the West Texas town of Midland after graduating from the Harvard Business School. Nothing made him happier than clearing brush off the Texas plains.

People who knew both men tended to favor the father. "Bush senior finds it impossible to strut, and Bush junior finds it impossible not to," said Bob Strauss, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee who served as ambassador to Moscow under Bush 41 and remained a loyal friend.11 "That's the big difference between the two of them."

More profoundly, they epitomized two diametrically opposed forces. On one side was the father, George H.W. Bush, a realist and a pragmatist whose domestic and foreign policies fit comfortably within the age-old American traditions of Jeffersonian democracy. On the other was his son George W. Bush, a radical evangelical poised to enact a vision of American exceptionalism shared by the Christian Right, who saw American destiny as ordained by God, and by neoconservative ideologues, who believed that America's "greatness" was founded on "universal principles" that applied to all men and all nations -- and gave America the right to change the world.

And so an extraordinary constrained nonconversation of sorts between father and son had ensued. Real content was expressed only via surrogates. In August 2002, more than seven months before the start of the Iraq War, Brent Scowcroft, a man of modest demeanor but of great intellectual resolve, was the first to speak out. At seventy-seven, Scowcroft conducted himself with a self-effacing manner that belied his considerable achievements. Ever the loyal retainer, he was the public voice of Bush 41, which meant he had the tacit approval of the former president. "They are two old friends who talk every day," says Bob Strauss. "Scowcroft knew it wouldn't terribly displease his friend."

Well aware that war was afoot, Scowcroft had tried to head it off with an August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece titled "Don't Attack Saddam" and TV interviews. As a purveyor of the realist school of foreign policy, and as a protŽgŽ of Henry Kissinger, Scowcroft believed that idealism should take a backseat to America's strategic self-interest, and his case was simple. "There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations," he wrote, "and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks." To attack Iraq, while ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, "could turn the whole region into a cauldron and, thus, destroy the war on terrorism." A few days later, former secretary of state James Baker, who had carefully assembled the massive coalition for the Gulf War in 1991, joined in, warning the Bush administration that if it were to attack Saddam, it should not go it alone.

On one side, aligned with Bush 41, were pragmatic moderates who had served at the highest levels of the national security apparatus -- Scowcroft, Baker, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, and Colin Powell, with only Powell, as the sitting secretary of state, having a seat at the table in the new administration. On the other side, under the younger George Bush, were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Advisory Board Committee -- all far more hawkish and ideological than their rivals.

Of course, both Scowcroft and Baker would have preferred to give their advice to the young president directly rather than through the media, and as close friends to Bush senior for more than thirty years, that should not have been difficult. After all, Scowcroft's best friend was the president's father, his close friend Dick Cheney was vice president, and Scowcroft counted National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley* among his protŽgŽs. And James Baker had an even more storied history with the Bushes.

"Am I happy at not being closer to the White House?" Scowcroft asked. "No. I would prefer to be closer. I like George Bush personally, and he is the son of a man I'm just crazy about."

But in the wake of Scowcroft's piece in the Journal, both men were denied access to the White House. When the elder Bush tried to intercede on Scowcroft's behalf, he met with no success. "There have been occasions when Forty-one has engineered meetings in which Forty-three and Scowcroft are in the same place at the same time, but they were social settings that weren't conducive to talking about substantive issues," a Scowcroft confidant told The New Yorker.

Meanwhile, Bush senior did not dare tell his son that he shared Scowcroft's views. According to the Bushes' conservative biographers, Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, family members could see his torment. When his sister, Nancy Ellis, asked him what he thought about his son's plan for the war, Bush 41 replied, "But do they have an exit strategy?"

In direct talks between father and son, however, such vital policy issues were verboten. "[Bush senior is] so careful about his son's prerogatives that I don't think he would tell him his own views," a former aide to the elder Bush told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. When the Washington Post's Bob Woodward told Bush 43 that it was hard to believe he had not asked his father for advice about Iraq, the president insisted the war was never discussed. "If it wouldn't be credible," Bush added, "I guess I better make something up."

Likewise, friends who saw them together found that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other on matters of vital national importance. "I was curious to see how they related to one another, and I'll be damned," said Bob Strauss, who shared an intimate dinner with them in the White House. "They never discussed the war, never discussed politics. We talked about social things, friendships, what was going on back in Texas. It was like a couple of old friends just gossiping about the past."

By 2006, however, tens of thousands of people had been killed in the Iraq War. Launched with the stated intention of eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destructions, the war had turned up no weapons whatsoever, and had instead raised profound questions about U.S. intelligence. Likewise, it had been disastrous in terms of America's strategic ambitions. Instead of shoring up Israeli security and replacing rogue regimes in the Middle East with friendly, pro-Western allies, the war had turned Iraq into a terrorist training ground. By eliminating Saddam Hussein, the United States had sparked a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that threatened to spread throughout and destabilize the entire Middle East. Far from creating a secular democracy, the war had empowered Shi'ite fundamentalists aligned with Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran, America's greatest foe in the region, had, unwittingly, been empowered. Dramatic action was necessary if Bush senior's legacy was to be saved.

Enter the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a panel chaired by James Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton and charged, in March 2006, with reassessing the deteriorating situation in Iraq and making policy recommendations. With Baker, the legendary Republican political operator and close friend of the former president, and Lawrence Eagleburger, who had also served as Bush 41's secretary of state,* on the commission, and with Brent Scowcroft a consultant to it, key figures of Bush senior's national security team finally had a politically opportune moment to present a bipartisan fig leaf that would enable the president to change course.

By now, however, Baker and Scowcroft knew that even their substantial persuasive powers would not change the president's mind, so they devised an alternative strategy.24 The key would be to get help from one of the very few people close enough to the president who could possibly persuade him to change direction -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The forty-eight-year-old Rice was slender, perfectly coiffed, and ferociously poised -- the most powerful African-American woman in the country. Having come of age working with Scowcroft and James Baker in Bush senior's administration, she had also developed a special, if somewhat strange, relationship with the younger Bush. When Rice once publicly referred to Bush as "my husband," it was widely seen as a Freudian slip that reflected how close they had become.25 Her predecessor, former secretary of state Colin Powell, once a trusted member of Bush 41's circle, had proven remarkably ineffective in fighting the neocons, and was long gone. That left Rice, the only member of the old guard who had unalloyed access to the president, as the crucial bridge between 41 and 43.

So, in late August 2006, according to a report by Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to Bill Clinton, in Salon, Scowcroft met with Rice to explain that a comprehensive new approach to the Middle East was in order, including a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rice seemed to agree. "How are we going to present this to the president?" she asked Scowcroft.

"Not we," replied Scowcroft. "You." He emphasized that only she was in a position to get Bush to change his policies.

About two weeks later, there were signs from the State Department that Scowcroft's meeting with Rice had paid off. On September 15, Philip Zelikow, Rice's closest aide, gave a speech asserting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be addressed if Arab moderates and Europeans were to cooperate with the United States in the Middle East.

Zelikow's talk was widely seen as the first sign of a dramatic shift in administration policy. As the November 2006 midterm elections approached, thanks to growing antiwar sentiment, the hawks were finally in retreat. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, two highly controversial neoconservative architects of the war, had left the administration the previous year under fire. And eight retired generals had demanded Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

But the neocons were not dead yet. Immediately after Zelikow's speech, Cheney's office responded with fierce attacks on Zelikow from inside the bureaucracy. Reports surfaced in the Jerusalem Post and the New York Sun, two neocon papers, undermining Zelikow's message. Faced with the prospect of battling Cheney, Condoleezza Rice caved instantly. The State Department assailed Zelikow. "The issues of Iran and Israeli-Palestinian interaction each have their own dynamic, and we are not making a new linkage between the two issues," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack announced. "Nothing in Philip's remarks should be interpreted as laying out or even hinting at a change in policy." On November 27, Zelikow abruptly resigned.

But, most important, Rice never followed through after her meeting with Scowcroft. She never stepped up to the plate to try to persuade Bush to change course. Once again, the neocons held sway. As a result, Bush 41's moderates were in a much weaker position than they had anticipated as the Iraq Study Group prepared to make its presentation.

The ritualized pomp and circumstance began at dawn on December 6, 2006, with the motorcade of long black sedans carrying the esteemed Wise Men (and one woman) to the White House. At 7:00 a.m., all ten members of the Iraq Study Group -- James Baker, Lee Hamilton, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, Clinton friend and adviser Vernon Jordan, former attorney general Edwin Meese, former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, former secretary of defense William Perry, and former senators Charles Robb and Alan Simpson -- arrived to hand-deliver signed copies of their report, "The Way Forward -- A New Approach," to the president.

Bush formally received the group, thanked Baker and Hamilton, congratulated them on their work, and made a brief, pro forma statement to the press: "We applaud your work. I will take it very seriously. And we will act on it in a timely fashion."

Then the dignitaries climbed back in their motorcade, which made its way up to the Capitol. With police sirens signaling their arrival, they met first with the House leadership behind closed doors, and handed out copies of the report. Book bearers in tow, Baker and Hamilton led the way down a basement corridor, through a banquet kitchen and a locker room where waiters had donned bow ties. Dozens of photographers and about two hundred journalists were present to document the delivery of the report to Senate leaders Bill Frist and Harry Reid.

Bipartisan commissions, by their nature, tend to be bland affairs, but in the urgency of the political moment, the Iraq Study Group was different. Congressional Republicans had just been swept out of power in the 2006 midterm elections; Rumsfeld had been tossed overboard. Now came James Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and consigliere, to talk some sense into the president. With his steely-eyed toughness, Baker was the neocons' worst nightmare. But to war-weary Americans, his presence signaled a moment of hope when it seemed that the president might finally accept the failure of his policies and try something new.

A reporter asked Baker if, given his close relationship to the Bush family, he thought the president could "pull a 180." "I never put presidents I worked for on the couch," he replied. "So I'm not going to answer that, because that would mean I'd have to psychologically analyze the inner workings of his mind. And I don't do that."

In fact, Bush had no intention of acting on the report's recommendations at all. Much of its content had leaked out beforehand, and Bush did not like what it said. With phrases like "grave and deteriorating" and "pessimism is pervasive," its verdict was clear: America's policies had failed. It was time to cut losses. The report highlighted the basic fallacy behind the administration's strategy: the new Iraqi army, the police force, and even Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki often showed greater loyalty to their ethnic identities than to the ideal of a nonsectarian, democratic Iraq. Ultimately, military solutions -- that is, sending more soldiers to Iraq -- could not resolve what were fundamentally political problems.

Journalists from the Washington Post and the New York Times said that, in rejecting all of its substantive recommendations, President Bush had, in private, used especially colorful language, calling the ISG study "a flaming turd." Even if that account was exaggerated, it seemed to convey the feelings that led him to dismiss the report so brusquely.

As for the elder George Bush, he was in the news, too. On December 5, less than twenty-four hours before the Iraq Study Group report was released, the former president addressed the Florida state legislature in Tallahassee, where his son Jeb was governor. In a speech about leadership -- run-of-the-mill stuff for a former chief of state -- Bush told the legislators how proud he was about Jeb's brave reaction to his defeat in the 1994 Florida gubernatorial election. "When it came down the homestretch," Bush senior said, "[Jeb] saw some unpleasant things happen, unfair stuff, but he didn't whine about it, he didn't complain."

Then the former president grabbed the podium as if to steady himself. He paused, obviously shaken. "Barbara will bawl me out...." he said wanly.

Now near tears, he continued. "A true measure of a man is how you handle victory," he said, his voice wavering. Again, Bush grasped the podium and hesitated before going on. "And also defeat."

Then his voice cracked. "So in '94 Floridians chose to rehire the governor," he said, "but they took note of his worthy opponent, who showed with not only words but with actions what decency he had." Fighting to keep his composure, he collapsed weeping as Jeb rushed over to comfort him.

In an earlier epoch, an inconsequential speech made in Tallahassee by a former president might not have even made the evening news. But in the era of YouTube and Internet video, it circled the globe instantly, not just for one news cycle but forever.

"It is not fully right, or fully fair, to guess about another's emotions," Peggy Noonan, Bush senior's former speechwriter, wrote afterward in the Wall Street Journal. "But no one who knows George H.W. Bush thinks that moment was only about Jeb. It wasn't only about some small defeat a dozen years ago. It would more likely have been about a number of things, and another son, and more than him."

Noonan pointed out that Bush senior must have known the contents of the Iraq Study Group's report that was being released the next day, and its damning judgment of his son's presidency. "Surely Mr. Bush knew -- surely he was first on James Baker's call list -- that the report would not, could not, offer a way out of a national calamity, but only suggestions, hopes, on ways through it. To know his son George had (with the best of intentions!) been wrong in the great decision of his presidency -- stop at Afghanistan or move on to Iraq? -- and was now suffering a defeat made clear by the report; to love that son, and love your country, to hold these thoughts, to have them collide and come together -- this would bring not only tears, but more than tears."

Less noticed, but just as striking as the former president's tears, was the fact that the son who had created this catastrophe was at the other end of the emotional spectrum. Far from showing signs of anguish at the horrors he had unleashed, George W. Bush displayed what Noonan called "a jarring peppiness."

And consider the context. A bipartisan panel had just eviscerated the centerpiece of his entire presidency. Moreover, by this time, there had been so many astounding revelations about Iraq that it was difficult to process them all. From Saddam's phantom WMDs to the "Mission Accomplished" photo op, from the fairy-tale pluck of Jessica Lynch to the heroic martyrdom of NFL star Pat Tillman, who had been killed by friendly fire, the Pentagon had trumpeted one Hollywoodized saga of the Iraq War after another. By and large, most of them had been revealed as lies. No longer was the Bush White House able to maintain control of the narrative. The carefully managed perceptions of the Iraq War were vanishing.

How could one believe in the noble ideal of democratizing the Middle East when American soldiers -- and even the Iraqi government itself -- hid out in the Little America bubble of the Green Zone, the so-called Emerald City, with its discos, fast food, porno shops -- and thousands of contractors from Halliburton? How could one see American soldiers as liberators after the reports of torture and horrifying abuses at Abu Ghraib that drove thousands of Iraqis not just to join the insurgency, but to cheer as the charred, mutilated bodies of dead Americans were dragged through the streets of Fallujah? How could one celebrate the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure when at least $12 billion in cash was flown to Baghdad, shrink-wrapped in plastic, and $9 billion of it vanished under highly suspicious circumstances. Or when untold billions went to virtually unregulated private security firms, which brought in tens of thousands of mercenaries who were paid enormous sums.

Meanwhile, in terms of blood and treasure, the costs of war had soared beyond anyone's worst nightmare. Billed as likely to last only a few months, this was a war that was to have practically paid for itself, officials had said. But with no end in sight, according to the ISG report, the war's price tag exceeded $400 billion and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz put its "true cost" much, much higher -- at more than $2 trillion. Far from funding the war as promised, Iraq's oil industry was being systematically sabotaged, its oil hijacked, with billions of dollars going to subsidize terrorists. No wonder oil prices had more than tripled since 2002 to well over $70 a barrel.

And then there were the gruesome and horrific human losses. Walter Reed Army Medical Center, itself a scandalous victim of neglect, was teeming with soldiers who had lost hands and arms, feet and legs, whose faces had been burned off, who had been paralyzed, who confronted lives very different from what they had imagined scant months earlier.

Meanwhile, at home, the world's greatest constitutional democracy had implemented unprecedented secrecy and spying on its own citizens. There had been a dramatic erosion of civil liberties. The creation of a Soviet-style gulag at Guantanamo made a mockery of America's Constitution by suspending habeas corpus and embracing the detention of prisoners -- allowing them no rights whatsoever. The presidency itself had become an "imperial presidency," consolidating enormous powers far beyond those intended by the founding fathers, effectively gutting the concepts of checks and balances.

None of which took into account the unforeseeable consequences that lay ahead for America thanks to the strategic disaster that was unfolding. Indeed, the Iraq War had accomplished precisely the opposite of its intentions. Rather than end terrorism, it created blood-drenched killing fields and vast new training grounds for tens of thousands of jihadists and Islamist militias. It created a new Iraqi state dominated by Shi'ites who saw Israel and America as their enemy. If there had been any winner at all, it had been the Islamic Republic of Iran. America's military was being stretched thin, its troops overburdened. Ultimately, the war had resulted in a historic decline in American power and prestige.

And yet, in the midst of all this, George W. Bush was, as Noonan put it, "resolutely un-anguished." How could he be so free of doubt in the face of such a cataclysm? As his father wept, how could he remain so serene?

As the situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate in the summer of 2007, the larger question of how America arrived at this moment, and precisely what that moment meant, was even less clear or understood. In the prosecution of the war, and the implementation of Bush's broader vision, many of America's most sacred institutions, from its judiciary to its national security apparatus, had been sabotaged and subverted. When it came to the constitutional checks and balances, to the powers of the executive branch, lines had been crossed, fundamental principles violated, putting at risk precisely what made America so special. Dick Cheney had led Donald Rumsfeld and the neocons in creating a separate, shadow national security apparatus to create a disinformation pipeline putting forth its own wished-for reality as a mechanism to start the war. As the summer of 2007 drew to an end, there was even reason to believe that the Bush administration would "double down" by bombing Iran, a potentially disastrous move that could ignite a global oil war and might spell the end of American supremacy forever. How had Americans been tricked into allowing these radical policies to be implemented? What were the deep cultural forces that had led the country to this historic catastrophe?

A hint could be found in Bush's ready explanation as to why he had not gone to his father for advice on Iraq. "You know," he said, "he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

Indeed, it was precisely this faith -- as opposed to reason -- that had made Bush such an ideal vehicle through whom to implement a revived vision of American exceptionalism, a vision shared by neoconservatives and the Christian Right, asserting America's right to fight tyranny all over the world. But how had this shared vision, this strange alliance of faith and ideology, come to be?

Astonishingly enough, the story of how neoconservative ideologues banded together with the Christian Right to forge these radical policies under Bush has never been fully told. In part, that may be because the religious sensitivities of both evangelical Christians and Jews make deep criticism of America's Middle East policies the third rail of American politics. Indeed, the entire topic is at odds with the way the discourse about the Middle East conflict has been framed in the United States, and so taboo that it rarely appears in the American press in any context whatsoever.

To truly understand the scope and meaning of the relationship between the neocons and the Christian Right, however, one would have to delve into subjects as varied and seemingly unrelated as theology and espionage, ancient history and the geopolitics of oil, biblical prophecy, political assassinations, and the secret ties between the Pentagon and Israel. One would have to travel in time from the exile of the Jews from the Temple in the pre-Christian era to the days of the early Puritan settlers in New England to the unending intrigue in Washington and the Middle East today. One would have to interview messianic Jews in Jerusalem and settlers in the West Bank; Likudnik politicians of the Israeli right and Rapturite fundamentalists from the Bible Belt; leaders of the Christian Right in Lynchburg, Virginia; neoconservative ideologues in Washington think tanks; CIA intelligence operatives in Langley, Virginia, and their Israeli counterparts in Mossad; and the many military officers and intelligence officials who rebelled against the Bush administration.

Finally, one would conclude that the most significant "clash of civilizations" today is not between Islam and the West at all, as the conflict is usually framed, but between fundamentalists -- not just Islamists, but Christian and Orthodox Jewish fundamentalists as well -- and the modern world. In other words, the most powerful enemies of our modern, humanist post-Enlightenment world may not be militant Islamists more than an ocean away, but Christian fundamentalists and their neoconservative allies who have been waging a ferocious war against "militant secularists," and who finally became influential enough to install, for the first time, a powerful leader of the Christian Right, George W. Bush, in the White House.

Copyright 2007 © Craig Unger