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To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
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88/99
Critics' Rating Index
74/99
Readers' Rating Index
90/99
Scholars' Citation Index
77/99
Volume of Reviews
46/99
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About This Book
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most disastrous 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 are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of important 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 group think, 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. No one is cheap-shotted 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 be prove to be, not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence to drive 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.
Reviews
"An evenhanded chronicler, Draper reminds readers that most Americans, most congressmen, and even the New York Times supported invasion ..."
"If Draper expertly dissects the ferocious turf battles that took place within the administration over the war, he does not really seek to set it in a wider context other than to note rather benignly that 'the story I aim to tell is very much a human narrative of patriotic men and women who, in the wake of a nightmare, pursued that most elusive of dreams: finding peace through war.' But there was more to it than that ..."
"The history of the Iraq War has rarely been told with so much authority and precision."
"Although exhaustive details might discourage general audiences, informed readers and foreign policy specialists will be engaged in what is likely the definitive contemporary account of the origins of the War in Iraq."
"compelling and richly documented ..."
"Draper has written the most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today."
"That makes Draper's account one for the ages, one to study not just to understand a war whose repercussions loom large given the Americans, Iraqis and others who've perished—and given the through-line from Bush's decision to the continuing U.S."
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