A complete explanation of the U.S. decision to go to war in 2003.

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.

The authors present a vital analysis of the foreign policy-making processes of the two Bush administrations prior to the attacks on Iraq. In a thorough comparison, they show how both presidents used historical analogies to evaluate information, relied on instinct to formulate decisions, and drew on moral language to justify their choices.

The first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture explains why preconceived ideas about the dictator led Washington policymakers and the Bush White House astray.

This edited volume presents the foremost scholarly thinking on why the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in both modern US foreign policy and international politics. In the years since the US invasion of Iraq it has become clear that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not as urgent as the Bush administration presented it and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. Many consider the war a mistake and question why Iraq was invaded. A majority of Americans now believe that the public were deliberately misled by the Bush administration in order to bolster support for the war. Public doubt has been strengthened by the growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion that suggest the administration was not candid about its reasons for wanting to take action against Iraq. This volume begins with a survey of private scholarly views about the war’s origins, then assesses the current state of debate by organising the best recent thinking by foreign policy and international relations experts on why the US invaded Iraq. The book covers a broad range of approaches to explaining Iraq – the role of the uncertainty of intelligence, cognitive biases, ideas, Israel, and oil, highlighting areas of both agreement and disagreement. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling creators of Op-Center comes a different kind of law enforcement. In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: Net Force®. Minor viruses are eating away at the Net Force computers. The e-mail shut-downs and flickering monitors are hardly emergencies—but they’ve been keeping the tech department hopping. Same with the sudden rash of time-consuming lawsuits. No one in Net Force has a moment to spare, which is exactly the way Mitchell Townsend Ames wants it. Because when the shadowy mastermind launches his master plan, he wants Net Force to be looking the other way…

The real story behind the investigation of Iraq, and the basis for the MSNBC documentary of the same name hosted by Rachel Maddow Filled with news-making revelations that made it a New York Times bestseller, Hubris takes us behind the scenes at the White House, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and Congress to show how George W. Bush came to invade Iraq--and how his administration struggled with the devastating fallout. Hubris connects the dots between Bush's expletive-laden outbursts at Saddam Hussein, the bitter battles between the CIA and the White House, the fights within the intelligence community over Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, the outing of an undercover CIA officer, and the Bush administration's misleading sales campaign for war. Written by veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, this is an inside look at how a president took the nation to war using faulty and fraudulent intelligence. It's a dramatic page-turner and an intriguing account of conspiracy, backstabbing, bureaucratic ineptitude, journalistic malfeasance, and arrogance.

Read the actual intelligence reports (not the spin)and make up your own mind. In America, the wife of the former ambassador who exposed George Bush's sixteen-word State-of-the-Union fib about uranium from Niger, is now being harassed by allies of the Administration. In Britain, the scientist who blew the whistle on Tony Blair has been driven to suicide. For all of us who, thanks to these whistle-blowers, now realize that we have been hoodwinked and want to understand exactly how, national security analyst John Prados has compiled and annotated the key source documents behind the selling of the Iraq war to the American public. As these CIA reports, Pentagon briefings, and other materials clearly show, Bush and his spokespeople were playing a crude game of three-card monte, claiming Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, and imminent threats, which are here exposed as half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications of a war-mongering administration. Prados, a noted historian of intelligence and national security, offers readers a first-hand view of incontrovertible evidence that we were had. Documents include 1995 CIA debriefing of Iraqi defector and former weapons chief Hussein Kamel October 2002 CIA White Paper/intelligence estimate October 2002 letter from CIA Director George Tenet to Senator Bill Graham December 2002 State Department/CIA "Fact Sheet" February 2003 text of Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council May 2003 CIA Paper on biological warfare production plants June 2003 Pentagon press briefing

A devestating account of the inner workings of the George W. Bush administration, written with the extensive cooperation of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. As readers are taken to the very epicentre of government, this news-making book offers a definitive view of Bush and his closest advisers as they manage crucial domestic policies and global strategies within the most secretive White House of modern times.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.