Anderson, Terry, Bush’s Wars, Oxford University Press, 2011
Bush’s Wars is an attempt to show what went wrong with President Bush’s War on Terror. Author Terry Anderson argues that the U.S. should’ve never invaded Iraq and that detracted from fighting Al Qaeda and the war in Afghanistan. He tries to put together issues that have been discussed before into one narrative but there are major problems with his history that undermines the work.
Anderson believed that President Bush should’ve focused upon Al Qaeda after the 9/11 terrorist attacks but went after Iraq instead. He goes through how the White House quickly shifted to Baghdad after the Taliban were overthrown in Afghanistan. The Bush administration launched a massive propaganda campaign using all elements of government to repeat the message that Saddam Hussein was a threat that convinced the public and congress to invade in 2003.
There is plenty of material that you can find in other books. For instance, Bush’s Wars talks about how the administration claimed they had to attack Iraq because it didn’t want Saddam to get a nuclear bomb and see a “mushroom cloud”. There’s the British Downing Street memos where UK officials said all the discussion within the White House was about how to go to war with Iraq rather than why.
The second half of the book covers the occupation of Iraq and how Afghanistan was neglected until President Obama ordered a surge of U.S. troops there. Again there are many familiar examples such as banning the Baath Party and disbanding the Iraqi military that turned thousands of people against the U.S. occupation. It ends with how the 2007 Surge in Iraq helped improve security but the government and economy were still big questions and how President Obama finally returned to Afghanistan at the start of his administration.
The problem is there are so many errors in Anderson’s story. The first two chapters are mostly a history of Iraq. It repeatedly includes things that never happened. For instance, it claims that the British made an alliance with the Kurds and promised them independence to fight the Ottomans during World War I. It said that British official Gertrude Bell created Kuwait as a British protectorate. It claims the 1941 Anglo-Iraq War was about maintaining England’s control of Iraq’s oil. None of this happened nor is true. It keeps getting things wrong over and over again.
There are holes throughout the book’s coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq as well. Anderson writes that the British were skeptical of the U.S. case against Iraq when Blair was the biggest supporter of war because he completely believed that Saddam was a threat and that he had WMD. The author claims the CIA questioned Iraq working on a nuclear bomb but Director George Tenet stood by its intelligence even after the Iraq Survey Group found no program or WMD.
Even if you ignore all the errors in Bush’s Wars history there’s another blaring gap in the story and that’s why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. Anderson talks about how 9/11 made Bush and his administration want to take dramatic action against any threat to the U.S. He writes about how the president believed in spreading democracy in the Middle East and more but there is no discussion at all about why Iraq became the target. Bush could’ve gone after North Korea or Iran after 9/11 if he was obsessed with threats. There’s nothing about why exactly he wanted Saddam deposed. This is a problem with many American books on Iraq. They have plenty of history about the steps the White House took to go to war but the essential question of why Iraq was the target is rarely analyzed.
In the end, Anderson’s argument that invading Iraq in 2003 was a massive mistake for the U.S. is a good one but why read a book that has so many problems to learn about this thesis? That’s the fatal flaw with Bush’s Wars. His sections on the U.S. occupation and Afghanistan are fine but the rest just repeatedly goes wrong.
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