David Sanger's The Inheritance is one of the best books I've read about the complex foreign-policy issues of the past eight years. Using his incredible access, David lifts the veil of secrecy in Washington and exposes the missteps and missed opportunities of the Bush administration. He interviews high-level government officials and puts you in the front row in the White House Situation Room. This is the kind of reporting we need a lot more of in this country.
Mika’s not the only one. The Sanger book comes with supportive blurbs from CBS’s Bob Schieffer and PBS’s Jim Lehrer, both presidential debate moderators last fall. What "kind of reporting" is necessary? As Clay Waters noticed at our Times Watch site, the New York Times itself lauded a "let ‘em rip" indictment of Bush’s over-aggressive war on terror:
Mr. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, drops the strict detachment of a daily reporter and lets rip, delivering a withering indictment of his longtime subject: President George W. Bush’s foreign policy, which he writes "has left us less admired by our allies, less feared by our enemies and less capable of convincing the rest of the world that our economic and political model is worthy of emulation."
...These unvarnished conclusions by Mr. Sanger will of course confirm the perfidy that Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly presume lies in the black hearts of Times reporters. But Mr. Sanger’s criticism, the product of extraordinarily diligent reporting, is too hawkish to be easily dismissed by conservatives.
Hawkish? Clay also noted that Sanger went on the Charlie Rose show on PBS and announced his book told the story of how the Iraq war was a massive blunder:
The argument of the book is that Iraq not only cost 4,000 American lives, $800 billion and untold casualties among Iraqis and Americans, it occupied so much of the attention and the resources of the top levels of the U.S. government that we ignored much bigger threats, short-term and long-term.
Sanger also appeared on The Daily Show, and host Jon Stewart compared the Bush administration to a group of drunken bar bullies who were spoiling for a fight every night. Sanger joked that designation clearly fit Dick Cheney.
