To Start a War
How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020
“The detailed, nuanced, gripping account of that strange and complex journey offered in Robert Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is essential reading—now, especially now . . . Draper’s account [is] one for the ages . . . A must-read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most consequential decision in the history of American foreign policy--the decision to invade Iraq.
Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper.
Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of consequential new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. Draper's fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Delusions, turf battles, and hubris drove a march of folly, according to this caustic and engrossing study of the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War. Journalist Draper (Dead Certain) documents the vaulting ambitions and outsized egos of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, long obsessed with overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a Machiavellian bureaucratic infighter who used the war to aggrandize his Pentagon fiefdom; Vice President Dick Cheney, who fixated on farfetched Iraqi threat scenarios; President George W. Bush, who felt a messianic duty to protect America and liberate Iraq; and CIA director George Tenet, who obligingly distorted the intelligence to validate "First Customer" Bush's preconceptions. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Draper details how the Administration misled itself and the public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, and dissects the starry-eyed assumptions and egregious lack of planning that turned the occupation into a bloody quagmire. Though the outlines of this story are familiar, Draper's psychological insights, well-crafted narrative, and colorful details spotlight the human complexity behind this tragic episode. The history of the Iraq War has rarely been told with so much authority and precision.
