Another Book on How Bush Screwed Up Iraq

The New York Times reviewed Fred Kaplan'sDaydream Believers:

"What sets Mr. Kaplan’s “Daydream Believers” apart is his emphasis on the Bush administration’s failure to come to terms with a post-cold-war paradigm, which, he argues, left America’s power diminished, rather than enhanced, as former allies, liberated from the specter of the Soviet Union, felt increasingly free to depart from Washington’s directives."

Also illuminating is his close analysis of the impact that the White House’s idées fixes had, not just on the Iraq war but also on other foreign policy problems like North Korea, and his detailed examination of the formative role that the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky played in shaping President Bush’s determination to try to export democracy around the world.

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Like so many earlier books about the Bush administration and its conduct of the war in Iraq, “Daydream Believers” leaves the reader with a portrait of a White House that circumvented traditional policy-making channels to implement its big ideas, and that often chose willfully to ignore history and the advice of experts — from the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s preinvasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq successfully, to warnings from the State Department that elections in the Middle East “could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements,” as they in fact were by Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Mr. Bush similarly emerges from this book as a naïve, impulsive and stubborn leader, whose moral certitude and penchant for denial have made him more inclined to double down on a bad bet than ever to admit a mistake, a president whose post-9/11 search for a bold new approach to the world made him susceptible to neoconservative ideas of pre-emption and unilateralism that had gained little traction with his father or Bill Clinton.

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Failing to acknowledge the limits of American power, he writes, President Bush and his aides ended up trumpeting the country’s “reduced powers — and, as a result, they weakened their nation further.” They “set forth a new way of fighting battles — but withheld the tools for winning wars. They aimed to topple rogue regimes — with scant knowledge of the local culture and no plan for what to do after the tyrant fell. They dreamed of spreading democracy around the world — but did nothing to help build the democratic institutions without which mere elections were moot or worse. In their best-intentioned moments, they put forth ideas without strategies, policies without process, wishes without means.”