In a recent interview with the Dalai Lama’s Representative to the Americas, Tashi Wangdi, David Shankbone remarked to him that Americans have trouble relating to centuries-long conflicts that exist between peoples around the world, including those in Asia.  Many Asian countries dislike each other tremendously, and the conflict over Tibet is just one enduring multi-national battle.
According to Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger, it is not that Americans do not have these deep-seeded conflicts; it is that they do not remember them and thus have no context in which to see them as they resurface in our political culture.  
On the same day he spoke to the Dalai Lama’s representative, Shankbone sat down with Unger, author of The New York Times best-seller House of Bush, House of Saud.   In his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, Unger attempts to fill in some of the blanks of an epochal narrative in American politics.  Using a mix of painstaking research, interviews with cultural and political leaders and delving into previously classified records to come up with some overview of how America has arrived at this particular political moment.   
To make sense of such complicated history, Unger draws upon three themes:  He illustrates the conflict within the modern Republican Party via the oedipal conflict between George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush.  Things are not well within the House of Bush.  Bush Jr. has not only shut out his father and his allies from his administration—something Bob Woodward discovered in his interviews with the President—but he also appointed many of his father’s bitterest enemies to key cabinet positions.
Unger’s second theme draws upon this Bush family feud: many of Bush Sr.’s foes happen to be leaders of the neoconservative movement, who had been working against the President’s father since the 1970’s.  Back then the neoconservatives did not have a base of political support within the Republican Party, which brings Unger to his third theme: the marriage between the neoconservatives and the Christian right to create a formidable ideological block.
Unger is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU’s  School of Law.  In addition to his work at Vanity Fair, he is a former editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine, and former Deputy Editor of the New York Observer.  A journalist of the old school who believes in verifying his sources’ veracity, Unger illuminates the Republican Party’s ideological struggle between the old and the new and traces its history for those who do know it.
Unger disputes the recent assertion by  The New York Times that these forces are dead; they are thriving.  Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Craig Unger about his book, The Fall of the House of Bush.  
David Shankbone:  Tim Wirth sent  David Mixner this article by Jim Holt in the London Review of Books, and Mixner sent me a link to it.  It posits that the Bush administration has all along planned on having a permanent military presence in Iraq.  Have you seen it?
DS:  You’ve written that Iran is definitely on the agenda for a military strike by the Americans.
DS:  If the neconservatives succeed, two years into the future where will we be?
DS:  Are there any Republican front-runners that would not undertake an assault on Iran?
DS:  So it could have been anybody but they ingratiated themselves with Bush?
DS:  And he wasn’t particularly well-informed, giving them an “in” to educate him?
DS:  Within the United States, what are the neoconservatives and Christian right concerned will happen that could scuttle their agenda?
DS:  Would that still work after all this time?
DS:  Is there a movement within the Republican Party that is working against the fundamentalism in the party?
DS:  Bob Woodward was astonished when Bush Jr. told him he had not spoken to Bush Sr. about the Iraq War at all.  Do you come across what is behind that?  
DS:  That was to educate Bush?   The Daily Show did this piece where they did a debate splicing Texas Governor Bush’s views of what he said when he was governor versus what he has said as President, and they are polar opposites.  When he was governor he was saying we can’t go out nation-building.
DS:  What was the problem with the intelligence apparatus at that time that the neocons needed to take control of it?
DS:  How did they bring Team B into the present?
DS:  So Rumsfeld and Cheney are not seen as old Bush Sr. people.
DS:  Weren’t they considered part of the realpolitik school?
DS:  What effect did it have on Bush Sr. that some of his bitterest foes were assuming positions in his son’s administration?
DS:  I remember that mentioned.
DS:  Why was there a dispute between Rumsfeld and Bush Sr.?
DS:  Coming back to current times, what continues to transpire in the formation of Bush Jr.’s 2000 cabinet?
DS:  I believe Riza was called Wolfowitz’s “neoconcubine” by his critics.
DS:  What does Mrs. Wolfowitz do about his extramarital affairs?
DS:  So they decide to redo the entire intelligence apparatus for Wolfowitz?
DS:  What was the CIA’s reaction to this?
DS:  Was Powell aware of this?
DS:  Why?
DS:  What is the end goal with all of these machinations?
DS:  Saddam was so unpopular in the region; how did they foresee they would ruin the coalition if they rid Iraq of a very brutal dictator?
DS:  It still is.
DS:  Arafat didn’t—
DS:  So what is the end goal?
DS:  To control it?
DS:  Was that a surprise?
DS:  In your book you talk about a confluence of social forces.  You have the Christian right and you have the neoconservatives, who came together to assist each other in their agendas.
DS:  To the 1970s?
DS:  Did they openly talk to you about these things?  
DS:  How did the neoconservatives and Christian right come together?
DS:  It would seemingly take a lot of collusion between them.  How does it work?
DS:  Bush is convinced this is all God’s will?
DS:  You have a chapter about the assassination of Yitzak Rabin; how did that advance the neoconservative agenda?
DS:  Are the Israeli orthodox Jews in touch with the Christian right in the United States?
DS:  What does the Christian right have to gain from this?
DS:  The End of Days?
DS:  This is so much material to be covered in just one book.
DS:  They have a model of the Supreme Court for arguing these fights.
DS:  Our society has always been complicated, but there are so many layers to this complex onion of a social movement that it must have been a challenge to articulate it in your book.  We hold a lot of myths about our history.   
DS:  Exactly, they recycle the same thematic stories over and over and that one has been written before.
DS:  But Scowcroft is loathed by George W.’s administration for coming out against his foreign policy.
DS:  What does Bush Sr. think or say about Scowcroft’s public statements?
DS:  Why would Bush Sr. not feel he has a moral obligation to the nation to make his feelings known to his son instead of keeping quiet and not speaking up?
DS:  The neoconservative’s policies are so high-risk and there are so many things that could make it go even more wrong.  Grover Norquist came out and said that nothing the supporters of the war said would happen with Iraq has happened, and that everything the critics said would happen has happened.  If Mubarak suddenly dies in Egypt and that country erupts into a civil war, which is a scenario that is often discussed as likely, that would implode the region even further.   How do they account for all these risks they are laying in the lap of the United States?
DS:  What sort of reaction do you get to your work?
DS:  You painstakingly researched this—
DS:  Who have lost almost all credibility with the public...
DS:  We’re stuck with them.
DS:  I interviewed Gay Talese, who had nothing but contempt for the Washington press corps.  He feels they should be broken up and dispersed around the country to report on the federal government.   Report on Washington from Denver, from Austin...national reporting from the states.  
DS:  You get to go to a party; you get to ride in Air Force One—
DS:  Just to be able to say, “I interviewed Donald Rumsfeld.”
DS:  Talese also said that the press is as much responsible for getting us into this war as are the people running it.

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Vanity Fair contributing editor Craig Unger on the Bush family feud, neoconservatives and the Christian right