Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A Copublication of Seven Stories Press and Akashic Books
The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq is the first book to hold the president and his team accountable for the government’s campaign of disinformation leading up to the war in Iraq. The administration repeatedly attested that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction and was close to using them; downplayed the cost and risk of the proposed invasion and occupation; shamelessly evoked the atrocious abuse of power of Hussein and his family while brooking no commitment to rebuild the country after the terrifying "shock and awe" campaign, or to do anything to improve the lot of the Iraqi people; and, most outrageously, provided substanceless theory linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks of September 11, thereby cynically manipulating the anger and sorrow of the American citizenry. The charade has culminated in the slow bloodletting of U.S. forces still stationed in Iraq, held there because it would not be politically expedient to admit the failure of "democratization."
While Bush II appears intent on conducting an unending global war against "evildoers," little public debate has gone into assessing the aims and strategies of such a broad campaign. In The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, coauthors Christopher and Robert Scheer and Lakshmi Chaudhry of the influential web magazine AlterNet.org have aggregated the hard questions that the purported leadership of the U.S. must answer.
Christopher Scheer is managing editor of AlterNet.org, the popular news and commentary website. Scheer has written screenplays for Oliver Stone and previously worked for the San Francisco Examiner. Robert Scheer is the author of six books, the host of NPR affiliate KCRW’s "Left, Right, and Center," and a contributing editor to both the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. Lakshmi Chaudhry is an editor at Alternet.org.
Synopsis
The first book to hold President Bush accountable for the government's campaign of disinformation leading up to the war in Iraq.
Publishers Weekly
Setting out to prove that "every major assertion that our government put forward to justify the conquest of Iraq has proved false," this broadside (more akin to a long article than a short book) reviews the evidence (or lack thereof) for linking Iraq to al-Qaida and 9/11, and reveals what the authors say is the inflation of Iraq's weapons capabilities and the erroneous assumptions about how long the war would take. Even sympathetic liberals may find the description of "the losing end of a long war of attrition" to be overstating the case. The concise account by veteran journalist Robert Scheer, his son and Chaudhry, editors of AlterNet.org, deftly incorporates dozens of other media sources, including very recent materials like Gerald Posner's Why America Slept. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.