Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraw War

• Author: Major Geoffrey S. Deweese
• Pages: 07

170 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 194

HUBRIS: THE INSIDE STORY OF SPIN, SCANDAL, AND THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR GEOFFREY S. DEWEESE2

"Did they mislead us, or did they simply get it wrong? Whatever the answer is, it is not a good answer."3

Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War is an engaging, yet sobering account of how the Bush administration used weak, faulty, and erroneous intelligence to sell the case for the Iraq War. The main goal of the book by journalists Michael Isikoff4 and David Corn5 is to demonstrate that the quality of the intelligence did not matter to the administration. As they state it, "Bush and his aides were looking for intelligence not to guide their policy on Iraq, but to market it. The intelligence would be the basis not for launching a war but for selling it."6

Aside from its value as a national after action review, Hubris provides leaders with an important lesson in the dangers of evaluating facts only in light of whether they support a preconceived result. However, Hubris falters by not providing a more complete context for its own positions. This review will focus first on these failures before turning back to the lessons learned from Isikoff and Corn's account.

Hubris asserts that the Iraq War was a "faith-based war-predicated on certain ideological and geopolitical views."7 The authors owe the reader a balanced analysis of what those views were, as well as the

historical and contemporary context for their development. Unfortunately, what little historical background Isikoff and Corn provide is not developed and put into context. For instance, the authors note that "Saddam's military ambition had been effectively constrained by the problematic but still-in-place sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War and by the previous UN weapons inspections,"8 but they do not touch on why the sanctions were problematic or why weapons inspections were still going on over a decade after the first Gulf War.

Isikoff and Corn do not discuss the creation of the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq and the continued efforts to patrol these areas with American air power.9 There is no mention made of the military strikes of Operation Desert Fox in 1998.10 This engagement, consisting of four nights of aerial and naval attacks with bombs and cruise missiles, was a direct result of Iraq's ongoing defiance of UN-mandated weapons inspections.11 Finally, there is no serious examination of the massive human rights violations in Iraq and their effect on the decision to oust Saddam, other than passing mention that Saddam "had gassed his enemies in the 1980s"12 and that inspectors found mass graves after the invasion.13

In addition to glossing over the historical background to the conflict, the authors fail to address meaningful contemporaneous events fully. This failure is apparent in the authors' discussion of David Kay, one of the UN weapons inspectors who had aggressively attempted to enforce the inspections in the early 1990s.14 Kay and his team had been able to verify through inspections that Iraq had been trying to develop a nuclear bomb prior to the first Gulf War, though they had to endure a standoff with armed Iraqi soldiers who attempted to confiscate the evidence.15

The documents he eventually got out of Iraq proved that the Iraqi government had lied about the extent of their program.16 According to Isikoff and Corn, in 2002 Kay briefed national Democratic leaders that

[T]he U.S. government couldn't really trust the Iraqis to come clean. . . . The only guaranteed way of disarming Saddam, and making sure he never got a nuclear bomb, was regime change. . . . Anything else, including relying on UN inspections, would entail risk and might not be sufficiently effective.17

Kay was not alone in believing that Iraq was not cooperating with inspections. After the UN Security Council passed a resolution in November 2002 which gave Iraq a final chance to cooperate with inspections and fully disarm,18 Iraq submitted a reply that chief UN Inspector Hans Blix called "not enough to create confidence."19

Unfortunately, Hubris provides no examination as to why Blix felt that way.

Further, Isikoff and Corn devote scant attention to the positive results from the search for weapons of mass destruction that occurred after the invasion, merely noting evidence showed that "[c]learly, Iraq had been working on prohibited missiles."20 While having prohibited missiles may not pose the same threat as having weapons of mass destruction, the fact that Iraq was hiding prohibited weapons of any type demonstrates the degree of obstruction the inspectors encountered in Iraq. Unfortunately, Hubris does not fully explore these factors, leaving the reader to wonder to what degree Iraq's lack of cooperation in the inspections program supported and informed the view of those who felt war was necessary.

Had the authors provided a more detailed analysis of the historical and contemporary context for the war, they would have been in a better position to evaluate the basis for the "ideological and geopolitical views"21 of those who supported the war. Yet they fail in this respect as well. This is apparent in the book's discussion of three key figures- President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

On 1 May 2002, President Bush was speaking with two...