The Fall of the House of Bush or Health Policy

The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future

Author: Craig Unger

The presidency of George W. Bush has led to the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States -- the bloody, unwinnable war in Iraq. How did this happen? Bush's fateful decision was rooted in events that began decades ago, and until now this story has never been fully told.

From Craig Unger, the author of the bestseller House of Bush, House of Saud, comes a comprehensive, deeply sourced, and chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how they assaulted the most vital safeguards of America's constitutional democracy while pushing the country into the catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East that is getting worse day by day.

Among the powerful revelations in this book:

• Why George W. Bush ignored the sage advice of his father, George H.W. Bush, and took America into war.
• How Bush was convinced he was doing God's will.
• How Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated George W. Bush, disabled his enemies within the administration, and relentlessly pressed for an attack on Iraq.
• Which veteran government official, with the assent of the president's father, protested passionately that the Bush administration was making a catastrophic mistake -- and was ignored.
• How information from forged documents that had already been discredited fourteen times by various intelligence agencies found its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in which he made the case for war with Iraq.
• How Cheney and the neocons assembled a shadow national security apparatus and created a disinformationpipeline to mislead America and start the war.

A seasoned, award-winning investigative reporter connected to many back-channel political and intelligence sources, Craig Unger knows how to get the big story -- and this one is his most explosive yet. Through scores of interviews with figures in the Christian Right, the neoconservative movement, the Bush administration, and sources close to the Bush family, as well as intelligence agents in the CIA, the Pentagon, and Israel, Unger shows how the Bush administration's certainty that it could bend history to its will has carried America into the disastrous war in Iraq, dooming Bush's presidency to failure and costing America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Far from ensuring our security, the Iraq War will be seen as a great strategic pivot point in history that could ignite wider war in the Middle East, particularly in Iran.

Provocative, timely, and disturbing, The Fall of the House of Bush stands as the most comprehensive and dramatic account of how and why George W. Bush took America to war in Iraq.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

When Mr. Unger sticks to the facts…and focuses less on the personal lives of his subjects and more on policy making in the Bush administration, his narrative skills enable him to do a fluent job of putting the available jigsaw puzzle pieces together. He gives readers a powerful account of the long-standing campaign by neoconservatives (which long predated the terrorist attacks of 9/11) to topple Saddam Hussein, the ideological roots of the administration's ideas about pre-emption and unilateral action, and the efforts of hawks in the Pentagon and the vice president's office to bypass regular policymaking channels and use cherry-picked intelligence to push for war.

Kirkus Reviews

A sobering examination of the twin fundamentalisms that shape the current administration internally-to say nothing of the one it's supposed to be fighting. Compassionate conservatism? Nice, disarming rhetoric, writes Unger (Center on Law and Security/New York Univ.; House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties, 2004, etc.)-but merely a way of reframing the argument so that "the entire political spectrum-everyone from hardcore theocrats to liberal secularists-supported policies that would aid the Christian Right." The gloves came off as soon as Bush II entered the White House and turned operations over to the very neoconservatives whom his father had largely frozen out of power, writes Unger in a bit of psychodrama at the opening of the book, giving the son's repudiation of the father appropriately tragic undertones. The neocons-most of them former leftists and most of them without any apparent religious beliefs-made unlikely allies for the Christian right-wingers who entered government in droves on Bush's ascension, but they had many interests in common, including pressing the battle against Islam and advancing the American empire. Most of these fundamentalists, religious and political, notes Unger, have been idealists without much grounding in the real world-one reason, perhaps, that all band together in detesting Henry Kissinger, that master of realpolitik. But, however ethereal their thinking, they have plenty of real-world effects. Unger works much the same territory as Kevin Phillips did in his American Theocracy (2005), and he turns in plenty of news. One interesting bit: Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state soinstrumental in putting Bush in office in 2000, was an acolyte of the same fundamentalists who pushed Jerry Falwell and company into secular politics-and, as an aside, she helped see to it that more than a quarter of the votes cast in Florida were not recounted, contrary to law. What next? Fundamentalists and neocons alike have been thoroughly discredited-but, Unger hints, there's still plenty of damage yet to come. Armageddon, anyone?

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Author: Charlene Harrington

The Fifth Edition of Health Policy is designed for all health professionals and anyone interested in or involved in the health care field. The authors are all experts in their subject matter. In their thoughtful articles, the most challenging issues facing the United State are explicated. The content provides information that will enrich the reader's understanding of the specifics and generalities of the problems Americans face in health care, both in the present and in the future. It also provides the impetus for individual and collective action.