Book Review: People, Politics and Purpose: Biography and Canadian Political History
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00207020231198035 |
| Author | Peter M. Boehm |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
path dependency that turned confrontation into invasion in early 2003. Here, Leffler’s
work could benefit from a few concepts from Political Science. While historians are
typically allergic to causal analysis, certain analytical possibilities should not be
elided so easily.
Finally, we come to the keyword in the title: “confronting”Saddam Hussein. In the con-
clusion, Leffler makes a provocative argument that Bush “decided to confront Hussein—
not invade Iraq.”
2
However, the distinction between “confronting Hussein”and “not invad-
ing Iraq”goes unexplained. Moreover, it carries major implications that raise more ques-
tions than Leffler answers. When did confronting Hussein become invading Iraq? When
did invasion become inevitable? Why did the US invade Iraq in March 2003 and not
some other time? Did Bush take the prospect of war seriously? If the intention was to con-
front Saddam, and not invade Iraq, then what accounts for invasion? This opens the possi-
bility that invading happened by accident, or at least, for reasons that are not explained in
this book.
Clearly, Confronting Saddam Hussein will not be the last word on the Iraq War.
Twenty years after the event, it stands as a valuable reminder of what we know and
of what remains unknown.
ORCID iD
Aaron Ettinger https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1761-7184
Greg Donaghy and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, eds.
People, Politics and Purpose: Biography and Canadian Political History.
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2023. 274pp. $34.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-77-486681-1
Reviewed by: Peter M. Boehm, (peter.boehm@sen.parl.gc.ca)
DOI: 10.1177/00207020231198035
This is a highly readable book of nine biographical essays, serving as a Festschrift for
John English, who, with his magisterial two-volume biographies of Lester Pearson and
Pierre Trudeau (among other works), is seen by many as Canada’s pre-eminent polit-
ical biographer. When I reached the book’s conclusion, John Milloy, who like English
has inhabited both the academic and active political spheres, introduces English with
“though never really my supervisor…” I stopped and reflected. That is how I describe
John English, as do many others: a talented and generous academic who over the years
has touched so many of us thesis writers and researchers with his generosity and men-
torship. We were not formally his students, yet in reality he was our intellectual and
career adviser. And so he has shaped Canadian biography. Robert Bothwell, himself
2. Ibid., 245.
Book Reviews 481
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