THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BUSH Craig Unger (Scribner)
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Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin’s drive for world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering—as CIA officers pointed out. Pipes’s group held, for instance, that the USSR had probably deployed a top-secret antisubmarine system, even though U.S. intelligence had found no credible evidence of such a program. As Unger writes, “The absence of evidence, [Team B] reasoned, merely proved how secretive the Soviets were!” It was a bold preemptive attack on fact and logic.
Team B’s creativity went unrewarded in the short term, as Jimmy Carter won the presidency that year. But Ronald Reagan would use the panel’s report to justify his enormous military buildup (and consequent budget deficits) in the 1980s, and in the ’90s Team B alumni and followers took aim at the Clinton administration’s Middle East policy. In 1996 a group of neocons led by Richard Perle produced a policy statement, “A Clean Break,” that prescribed military action to remove anti-Israeli governments like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq. When George W. Bush entered office, flanked by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, the report became a blueprint for war.
Unger also underplays the importance of oil-industry leaders, including his previous subjects, the Saudis. Journalist Greg Palast obtained a report by the Joint Task Force on Petroleum, cosponsored by the James A. Baker III Institute, named for and headed by the secretary of state under Bush’s father. The panel, which included oil-company executives as well as foreign-policy specialists, convened in December 2000. Its report complained that Iraq was a “swing producer” of oil, with a propensity to “manipulate oil markets.”
