Early in 1998, my wife and I called on Governor George W Bush in Austin, the capital of Texas. There was already talk that he might run for president. Although he was pretty cagey, it was obvious Bush wanted to do it. He went out of his way to tell us (as did Karl Rove, his political consigliere) that he was more like his famously tough-talking mother than his gentlemanly father. The message was clear. George Bush, the son, would make a more resolute president than George Bush, the father, defeated in 1992 by Bill Clinton after only one term.

We went to see Bush again a year later. He was about to announce his decision to run for president. He made no bones about his lack of experience in foreign affairs. He intended, he said, to compensate by surrounding himself with experienced people, who would help him learn. This was an allusion to the Vulcans, a group of foreign-policy experts, who, under the direction of Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice, would guide Bush through the shoals of campaigning. Most of them joined his administration.

On this second visit to Austin, Bush tried out on us a statement of principles for American foreign policy. At its core was a sweeping commitment to stand up for democracy and freedom around the world. Much water has passed over the dam since then. But even today, almost a decade later, a foreign policy speech by Bush has some echo of those brief remarks.

These Austin encounters revealed three things: the importance to Bush of measuring himself against his parents and siblings;the broad vision and sense of mission that were to invest his foreign policy, especially after 9/11; and the reliance he would place on close advisers. Each of these threads is explored in detail by Jacob Weisberg.

Weisberg is a veteran commentator on American politics; he has published several editions of “Bushisms”, the president’s verbal infelicities; and he is now the editor of Slate, the widely read online political magazine. With these credentials — and the book’s title — nobody should expect Weisberg to do Bush many favours; he is, accordingly, unsparing in his criticism of what he considers a hopelessly failed presidency. But The Bush Tragedy is far more than just another anti-Bush tirade by a liberal Democrat. Weisberg regards the president as neither the idiot of European caricature nor the pawn of his advisers.

The Bush Tragedy is a psychological and political portrait. On Iraq, Weisberg says that Bush’s “unconscious motive was finishing his father’s business. His conscious one was draining the Islamic swamp”. The psychological bit of the portrait takes in family, education, religion, close advisers (“the alternative family”), Shakespeare, and Bush’s own temperament. The heart of the thesis is the son’s complicated relationship with the father, in which young Dubya’s lifetime quest for Poppy’s approval is in permanent tension with his ambition to do better as president. This leads

the son to behave in the Oval Office in conscious contrast to his father’s deliberative, collegial and pragmatic style. If this sounds like a recipe for psychobabble, strained through the mesh of half-baked analogies with Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V, it is nothing of the sort. Weisberg executes his portrait with panache and economy. His diligent research, his lucid style and the intelligence of his argument are more than convincing.

There is much interesting stuff on how Bush found religion and abandoned alcohol; on his closest advisers, Rove and Dick Cheney, and their essentially subordinate relationships to Bush (which may come as a surprise to those who mistakenly see the vice-president as puppet-master-in-chief); and on his dealings with the Christian evangelicals, to whom Bush and Rove were as politically solicitous as they were theologically indifferent. But all this is a prelude to Weisberg’s account of the effect on Bush of 9/11 — the watershed of his presidency — and why this led to war in Iraq.

Here Weisberg covers ground already heavily trampled by others. But he illuminates this familiar territory with sharp flashes of novel insight. I have always thought that Bush’s critics fail to make sufficient allowance for the shattering impact of 9/11. Weisberg argues that both Bush and Cheney “fervently believed” that America would face further attacks, a not unreasonable belief nourished by the mysterious rash of anthrax-tainted letters sent in October 2001 to the White House, Congress and elsewhere. Their provenance has never been established; but, again, in the context of the time, it was not unreasonable to suspect Saddam Hussein, who had used germ warfare against Iran and his own people. This leads Weisberg to an extremely important conclusion. “Those who believe the vice-president . . . concocted evidence of Iraqi WMD to justify a war . . . should consider his stance on universal smallpox vaccination . . .” Cheney was the nation’s foremost advocate of immediate nationwide jabs — a policy that, if pursued, would have killed hundreds and made thousands seriously ill. “Cheney’s readiness to sacrifice hundreds of civilian lives may make him sound like Dr Strangelove. But if the idea was mad, it was sincerely mad, testifying to how seriously he took the possibility that Saddam had biological weapons and might use them, or give them to terrorists to use, against the United States.” I think this gets it exactly right, and for Bush, too.

I am not sure that I agree with Weisberg on when the Iraq war became inevitable, and I always thought the White House less implacable about invasion than the vice-president’s office. But these are minor quibbles. This is a book of unusual interest and entertainment, one of the best — and the shortest — I have read on the subject. And if tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, it might even engender that rarest of sentiments — a little sympathy for George W. By the way, Tony Blair is only a spear carrier in Weisberg’s tragedy.

Christopher Meyer was British ambassador to the US from 1997 to 2003 and is the author of DC Confidential.

The Bush tragedy:The Unmaking of a President by Jacob Weisberg
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp271

Times Recommends

• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner
• Is Bertie Wooster the only fish-faced hero?