To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq

by Robert Draper

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 na�vet�, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with id�es 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.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Middle East, War, American History, Military Fiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2020

About the author

Robert Draper is a freelance writer, a correspondent for GQ and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Previously, he worked for Texas Monthly, where he first became acquainted with the Bush political family.

Robert Draper attended Westchester High School in Houston, Texas. He is the grandson of Leon Jaworski, prosecutor during the Watergate scandal, segregation trials, and Nazi war crimes, which is said to have influenced Draper's writing about the use and abuse of power. Draper was active in high school debate. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, writing for the university newspaper The Daily Texan.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The decision to invade Iraq was [President George W.] Bush’s alone to make. But he had an abundance of help. Some in the upper tiers of the administration vigorously urged that decision. Others did what they could to make his decision less difficult. None of them advised him to decide otherwise. Those lower down the Bush administration’s food chain who would have counseled against the decision variously did not speak up or were not given the chance to speak or did speak but went unheeded…[This] story…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…”
- Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq

It’s an odd time to read Robert Draper’s To Start a War, about President George W. Bush’s disastrous choice to invade Iraq in 2003. The reason is that the war, which began seventeen years ago (and “officially” ended in 2011), feels like it took place in a different age. At the time, it seemed like the Iraq War would be an epochal event; coming off a year in which (among many other things) a worldwide pandemic has killed roughly the same number of Americans as World War II, it no longer feels quite so enormous.

With that said, the Bush Administration’s heedless leap into an unnecessary conflict remains among the great blunders in the history of the United States. It was an emblematic moment that marked eight years of fear, hysteria, and political fracturing, involving issues that were once too red-hot to be viewed with anything resembling coolness and dispassion.

Now, time and intervening events have given us some measure of perspective.

Unsurprisingly, Draper’s cool and dispassionate judgment is that President George W. Bush, abetted eagerly by men such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and unwittingly by others such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, led America into a long-running, lethal, and high-priced war based on false pretenses and obviously-flawed intelligence. More than that, the light-footprint war plan devised by Rumsfeld cavalierly lacked any plans or preparation for what happened after the military victory that was sure to come.

These are conclusions that are carried by the overwhelming weight of the evidence, and have been known for years. Nevertheless, the value of To Start a War is in its telling.

Make no mistake: Draper does not pull any punches in assessing the Iraq adventure. At the same time, however, this is an extremely humanistic look at a self-inflicted disaster, about as far from Michael Moore as you can get. Instead of greedy corporatists looking to seize oil, Draper’s account paints a picture of an administration filled with dangerously zealous idealists, gripped by a tremendous fear following 9/11. There is a great deal of nuance on display – which might not sit well with some – and even a little bit of sympathy. This is not a fire-breathing polemic but a Greek tragedy.

Draper begins his narrative on September 11, 2001, at a Pentagon that has just been struck by American Airlines Flight 77. From there, he shows how startlingly fast the Bush Administration began looking at Iraq as a target for retribution. Once that ball got rolling, it never slowed, and it never stopped, not until the unsuccessful decapitation strikes launched on March 19, 2003, the opening stage of our longest war.

I enjoyed To Start a War a great deal, but as I noted above, it is not breaking any new ground. Most of Bush’s mistakes are well known. It has long since became clear that Saddam Hussein (a secularist) and Osama Bin Laden (assuredly not a secularist) never plotted together. Beyond that, despite everyone’s presumption that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, it has been made abundantly clear that he had no ongoing nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs. These are not revelations.

Instead of presenting an “unknown story,” the value of To Start a War is that it delivers a well-known tale with incredible skill. Draper elegantly structures this volume so that even as he moves forward chronologically, he provides a larger context for events by jumping back in time to recount the rise of Saddam Hussein, the invasion of Kuwait, and the stunningly successful Operation Desert Storm. No matter where he is on the timeline, though, Draper works to orient the reader as to where they are, and what is happening at the same time. The pacing is fantastic, a real-life thriller where knowing the outcome does nothing to sap the drama.

Best of all is Draper’s marvelous thumbnail sketches of the participants. From top to bottom, the characters involved are given real dimensions, even when they were catastrophically wrong. There is Colin Powell, of course, one of the most respected men in all of government, whose carefully built-up credibility was squandered in a single infamous speech, and who was thanked by the Administration by being unceremoniously dumped in the second term. You have bureaucratic infighter extraordinaire Don Rumsfeld, he of the smug, smirking, spectacularly self-satisfied tautologies and homey aphorisms. There is also Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the much vilified arch neoconservative and alleged “architect” of the Iraq War, who came off as a cartoon troll in Fahrenheit 9/11. Here he is presented as a true believer of the need to topple Saddam Hussein who, as Draper reminds us, was not exactly as pure as the driven snow.

As Commander-in-Chief, responsibility resides with President Bush, and Draper underlines that repeatedly. Others seem more villainous, especially Cheney, who dissembled and lied to the American public on numerous occasions, saying things he knew to be untrue or unproven. Ultimately, though, Cheney (for all his ambitions) did not have constitutional authority to launch the invasion. That belonged to Bush alone. It may well be that Bush is a relatively decent and compassionate man, but he sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

Aside from President Bush, there is more than enough blame to go around. The Central Intelligence Agency, and Director George Tenet, are raked over the coals for shoddy spy work and shoddier analysis. According to Draper, Tenet – in an effort to keep his access with the President – essentially started telling Bush what he wanted to hear, instead of what he needed to hear. The American media, too, is given a scolding for their relentless support of the drive toward war. It is hard to believe that Bush would have prevailed in public opinion without the vigorous work of Washington Post and New York Times reporters and editors who – like many others – abandoned reason in the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers. Also playing key roles were the United States Armed Forces, manipulative expatriates such as Ahmad Chalabi, the United States Congress who gave President Bush a blank check, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The lesson of To Start a War is no less important for being simple and obvious: ideology can be a dangerous thing. For the Bush Administration, Saddam Hussein and Iraq were an idée fixe. Their beliefs were so strong that it caused them to believe poor intelligence, discount good intelligence, and to engage in a great deal of magical thinking about how the dominoes would fall once Saddam was removed. It is still – seventeen years later – too soon to tell how it will all play out. Yet it is abundantly clear that the initial decision to invade Iraq was a toxic combination of bad process, bad strategy, bad assumptions, and bad foresight. Likely this will serve as a case study in terrible decision-making for as long as such things are studied.

***

Looking back at it now, the Iraq War seems even more futile and wasteful. In the days after September 11, 2001, and in the leadup to war, Americans were told repeatedly that we faced an existential threat. We were convinced that the peril emanating from the Middle East was going to kill us all. Threat levels were created, and then raised; we took off our shoes at the airport; we all believed that we were going to die suddenly and violently, if not in a skyscraper gutted by a hijacked airliner, then coughing in a cloud of sarin gas, or vaporized in the light-clap of a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb smuggled into a major metropolis. Bush and his minions told us that freedom was under attack, that our very way of life hung in the balance.

How quaint a notion.

When the terrorists eventually took the United States Capitol building - on January 6, 2021 - they did not do it using commandeered vehicles or suicide vests or even heavy weapons. They did not come from Iraq or Iran or Afghanistan or any other place we’d been taught to fear. They did not believe in an extremist vision of Islam. They did not shout “God is Great.”

No, when the terrorists captured the United States Capitol, in an attempt to overthrow the government, they came from the United States itself. With bum-rush tactics, a bit of police gear, and a lot of slogans, they did what Jefferson Davis and Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo and Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein could never do, not – in the words of Lincoln – “in the trial of a thousand years.”

As Draper carefully details, with regard to Iraq, President Bush was wrong about everything. The thing he got most wrong, however, was the vector of the risk to this nation.

It turns out that we were the existential threat all along.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really a 4 star book, but I could also give it 5 stars because it's a must-read if you already do not know most of this stuff (if you don't know it, start with the Jane Meyer book probably).

First the bad, he completely leaves out the background stuff to the Iraq war--not just Desert Storm because maybe that's not immediately relevant, but there are a few parts where he talks about Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iran or that the UN vetoed the sanctions against him--it is relevant that Dick Cheney was involved behind the scene in both of those. So it's really relevant to this story and they are written here as in passive voice. Like, "Saddam was sold weapons and the UN vetoed sanctions against him for using them." Where it should read in the active voice.

The good: Oh man, is this a tragedy! The most tragic thing about all of this is how Powell becomes the lynchpin to justify the war because he's the only one who has a good reputation (I mean, why wasn't that a big red flag to everyone?) and then he ruins his reputation. This was such a needless and stupid war and the thing is, we (some of us) knew it at the time. For anyone who had a rudimentary knowledge of the middle east, this was a mistake and it was all a lie. But I feel no satisfaction in being vindicated.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Draper's To Start a War revisits George W. Bush's disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Draper (author of the Bush biography Dead Certain) recapitulates how Bush escalated post-9/11 retaliation into a "Global War on Terror," with Iraq as its centerpiece, on a combination of dubious intelligence, moral certitude and misguided idealism. Draper reiterates the well-known feuds between Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, etc. while also stressing the efforts of lower level military, intelligence and State Department officials to stop the invasion. In this, as in other respects, the book seems eerily prescient. Where the present president rants about a nebulous "Deep State," Cheney and Rumsfeld envisioned themselves besieged by military and intelligence bureaucrats who hid intelligence of Saddam Hussein's weapons program and ties to al-Qaeda. And the Bush Administration also nurtured conspiracy theories (Paul Wolfowitz's affinity for anti-Saddam crackpot Laurie Mylroie receives due attention), a paranoid obsession with loyalty to the President, contempt for experts, willingness to destroy officials honorable (Colin Powell) and loyal (George Tenet, Condi Rice) for political ends, and pursuing destructive policies in the face of truth, opposition and countless casualties. Even if there's little that's precisely new, especially for those old enough to remember the invasion firsthand, it's a helpful corrective to those who'd rehabilitate George Bush because Trump, somehow, is even worse. To Start a War makes clear that Dubya's position as one of America's most destructive presidents is well-deserved; the consequences of his Administration are still being felt, both at home and abroad.

[Steven Z. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In reassessing the results of the Iraq War one thing is clear, the United States made a terrible error invading Saddam Hussein’s kingdom in 2003. If one looks objectively at the current state of the Middle East one can honestly conclude that the ultimate victor was Iran. Iraq was a state that was held together by an authoritarian regime that dealt with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Once the war brought “shock and awe,” or devastation the country split apart into civil war eventually allowing Iran to ally with Shiite forces and influence its government, fostered the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), contributed to the Syrian civil war, reinforced Turkey’s goal of destroying the Kurds, and diminished the American presence and reputation in the region. One could argue that looking back after fifteen years that the mess that was created has pushed Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, particularly the United Arab Emirates closer to Israel as they have a common enemy in Iran, but that analysis does not undo a disastrous war. The war itself is the subject of an excellent new book by Robert Draper, a writer at large for the New York Times, entitled TO START A WAR: HOW THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION TOOK AMERICA INTO IRAQ.

The book is a detailed overview of how the United States wounded by the 9/11 attacks sought revenge against the Taliban in Afghanistan for harboring al-Qaeda, but not satiated despite destroying the Taliban, the Bush administration almost immediately sought further retribution against Saddam Hussein who they tried to link the attacks on the World Trade Center. The decision making process that is presented is often convoluted and mired in a fantasy world of polluted intelligence as men like Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary, Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, I. Lewis Scooter Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, and ultimately President Bush pushed the United States into war against Iraq. What emerges are CIA and other intelligence analysts bending and twisting intelligence to fit their preconceived notions to create an acceptable causus belli against Iraq. There are a number of heroes in this process who tried to stop the roller coaster of bad intelligence and personal vendettas, but in the end, they failed leading to the most disastrous war in American history. A war we are still paying for.

Draper leaves no stone unturned as he pieces together almost every aspect of the decision making process that led to war. Relying on over 300 interviews of the participants in the process, newly released documentation, command of the memoirs and secondary material, and his own experience in the region, Draper has written the most complete study of the Bush administration’s drive towards war. Draper traces the ideological and emotional development of the participants, some of which longed to finish off the Gulf War of 1991 that they believed was incomplete, others who possessed a visceral hatred of Saddam Hussein, and others who saw an opportunity to foster a revolt that in the end would bring about American control of Iraqi oil.

The picture that emerges is a cabal led by Cheney and Rumsfeld who would accept nothing less than the removal of Saddam; a National Security Advisor, Condi Rice who was in over her head in dealing with bureaucratic infighting; Colin Powell, a Secretary of State who opposed the neo-cons in their push for war, but remained the loyal soldier; CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton hold over trying to prove his loyalty though he seems to have known better, and a president who thrived on his “gut,” a version of human emotion and anger for an Iraqi attempt at assassinating his father. All of these characters are flawed but each had an agenda which they refused to take no for an answer.

What is clear from Draper’s presentation is that before 9/11, despite repeated warnings from Richard Clarke and the intelligence community the Bush administration did not take the terrorist threat seriously with people like Wolfowitz arguing that CIA analysts were giving Osama Bin-Laden too much credit. The administration ignored a combined CIA-FBI brief of August 6, 2001 warning that “Bin-Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” Once the attack took place the US responded with Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001 and in a short time 27 of 30 Afghani provinces were liberated from the Taliban. As the situation in Kabul was evolving, Rumsfeld was already switching the Pentagon’s focus to Iraq. Bush, now saw himself as a wartime leader with a newly found cause and for the first time in his career equated his situation with other wartime Presidents. By January 2002 American assets were already being transferred to Iraq.

As the narrative evolves it is obvious that Bush’s national security team is one on dysfunction with back biting, disagreements, and power grabs. It is clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney who pushed for war disliked and disagreed with Powell, who wanted to work through the United Nations. Powell reciprocated his feelings toward them and their cohorts, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Libby. Draper offers a number of chapters on these principle players and delves into their belief systems and their role in developing war plans to overthrow Saddam. The specific evidence that decision making relied upon was fourfold. First, a senior al-Qaeda operative, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was captured by the United States and after failing to reveal anything of value he was turned over to the Egyptians for further interrogation. After being coerced by the Egyptians Al-Libi would confess that two al-Qaeda recruits had been sent to Baghdad in 12/2001 to be trained in building and deploying chemical and biological weapons. Later this “evidence” was deemed to be a fabrication by the CIA and DIA. Second, supposedly on April 9, 2001, one of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague, however after careful vetting this too turned out to be false. Third was Rafid Ahmed al-Takari, nicknamed “curveball” by German intelligence claimed to be an Iraqi chemical engineer at a plant that designed more than 6 mobile biological labs. Fourth, Cheney believed that Saddam had agreed to purchase 500 tons of yellow cake uranium per year from the government of Niger. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the spouse of CIA analyst Valerie Plame was sent to investigate, and he concluded there was no substance to the charge.

The dysfunction in planning for war is obvious when Bush inquired if there was a National Intelligence Estimate for the proposed invasion. Tenet responded there was none, and he had 19 days to create one a process that normally took between four months to a year to compile. The result was a NIE that played fast and loose with intelligence and it pulled in anything that remotely was credible to make its case for war. The problem according to Draper is that Bush had decided in August 2002 to go to war, and the NIE of October 1, 2002 had to come up with a justification for Bush’s decision. The final NIE consisted of badly outdated intelligence which was often fabricated. This is not the only example of a threadbare approach to intelligence. Once Powell, because of his gravitas and reputation was chosen to address the United Nations on February 5, 2003, a speech designed to augment a coalition and the support of the international body the die was already cast. The problem was that the evidence that Powell used in his speech, i.e., curveball and other improbable theories provoked disdain from certain American allies and the Arab world in general. Powell plays an important role in Draper’s narrative as he conjectures what might have occurred if the Secretary of State had refused to go along with the push toward war. However, as many other authors have offered, Powell was a military man whose loyalty was to the chain of command, so he was coopted. In the end the neocons were hell bent on war and regime change and Powell’s reputation visa vie Cheney, Libby, Feith and Wolfowitz there was probably little else he could do.

If planning for war was disjointed, planning for post-war Iraq was a disaster. Rumsfeld argued “we don’t do windows,“ meaning nation building. The Pentagon refused to make serious plans once Saddam was overthrown. Cheney and his people argued that the Iraqi people would greet American soldiers as heroes and with a minimum of American aid could oversee their own adoption of democracy. On the other hand, Powell and his staff argued that an occupation force would be needed probably for two to three years. A number of sketchy characters from the Iraqi exile community emerges, particularly Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who had not been in Iraq for decades whose machinations behind the scenes finally led to Bush’s refusal to support him as Iraq’s version of “Hamid Karzai.” The lack of American planning or arrogance would foster a complete disaster once the American occupation was created.

If one wonders why Draper’s book should be read now Joshua Geltzer argues that it clear that “he exposes the key points about the relationship among the American president, the executive branch he leads and the intelligence he receives that burn as fiercely today as they did almost two decades ago.”* From the evidence that Draper offers the decision for war rested with George W. Bush. As the self-styled “decider” it was Bush as president not his cabinet and other minions who bare the ultimate responsibility for war and what occurred after the fighting ended. Obviously, the politicization of intelligence played a major role in Bush’s decision making. Draper’s account is extremely important , it is one “to study not just to understand a war whose repercussions loom large given the Americans, Iraqis and others who ‘eve perished – and given the through-line from Bush’s decision to the continuing American presence in Iraq and the persistent threat from terrorists there and in Syria in the wake of the US invasion.”*

It should come as no surprise that regime change is a dangerous undertaking. All one has to do is look at Libya and Iraq. As President Trump contemplates through his tweets about regime change in Iran, perhaps he should read Draper’s narrative before he makes a decision that would be disastrous for the American people.


*Joshua Geltzer, “Behind the Iraq War, a Story of Influence, Intelligence and Presidential Power,” Washington Post, August 21, 2020.

[Alex Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of how the US embarked upon one of its worst ever foreign policy disasters, the Iraq war, is a story well-told and territory well-covered. Yet if you're someone like me who's tired of the Bush rehabilitation project and the credulous liberals who keep abetting it (see: the seal-clapping after his eulogy at John Lewis' funeral), Robert Draper's magisterial account of the build-up to that disaster is a welcome, measured rejoinder.

For those with knowledge of the events leading up to the war, the general narrative will seem familiar enough: an ideologically-driven administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to push for war, ruthlessly barreling its way forward by cherry-picking intelligence to support its preconceived notion that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the US. Public opposition was cowed and every elite institutional faction was brought into line. Draper retells these events with considerable narrative polish, fleshing out some of the details with hundreds of interviews with people burrowed deep in the military, diplomatic, and intelligence establishment.

And the details are still damning enough to shock and appall, even nearly two decades later, as the pernicious nexus of blinkered ideology and flimsy intelligence that paved the road to war is expertly recounted by Draper. Paul Wolfowitz, before 9/11, was so obsessed with the notion of a Saddam/al-Qaeda link that he pressed his CIA briefer to find ties between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press in December 2001 that it was "pretty well established" that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001, based on one source who claimed he was "70% sure" that the person the Iraqi official met with was Atta. The CIA even briefed Bush that a Greek woman claiming to be Saddam's former mistress once met Osama bin Laden in one of Saddam's presidential palaces. The illogic of a Saddam/bin Laden connection was apparent for all to see (why would a secular ruler and a radical Islamist team up? Indeed, one of the more interesting revelations in the book is that Iraq's foreign minister right after 9/11 sent quiet feelers to a former Reagan administration official with an offer of a tacit anti-al Qaeda alliance with the US), yet the administration continued to parrot these claims throughout the build-up to war. Anyone inclined to snicker at Trump supporters for buying into zany conspiracy theories about the Clintons should remember that political elites can be just as paranoid and conspiratorial as anyone, even if their conspiracy-theorizing is higher-grade.

The ideologues found a willing partner in the CIA and its director, George Tenet, who come across especially badly in the book. The agency, having been shunted to the sidelines in the 90s, suddenly found itself in the frontlines of the "war on terror" after 9/11 and was desperate to make itself useful to the Bush administration. Realizing that Bush was set on war with Iraq, Tenet decided to enlist the CIA in the effort to help sell the war. Caution and prudence were thrown to the wind as otherwise ambiguous intelligence was interpreted through the most alarmist lens: aluminum tubes that the CIA claimed Iraq had purchased for use as nuclear centrifuges were seen by Department of Energy analysts as better suited for rocket launchers. The CIA also uncritically regurgitated claims from an Iraqi defector in Germany that the regime had mobile biological weapons labs, even though the agency hadn't interviewed the source and had reason to believe he was a liar. Colin Powell based his famous presentation before the UN on Iraq's WMD program on this intelligence, which he understood to be rock-solid and authenticated but was instead either heavily distorted or outright fabricated.

Draper doesn't necessarily let Powell off the hook though. He makes clear that whatever Powell's doubts about the wisdom of the invasion, he was nonetheless the administration's indispensable salesman for it. Draper cleverly frames Powell's famous summer 2002 warning to Bush of the negative consequences of a war with Iraq as a missed opportunity to warn Bush against invading altogether. He even spins an interesting counter-factual of a Powell resignation tipping enough dominoes to stop the war from happening: I'm personally skeptical - I think Bush was determined to invade no matter what - but it's an interesting hypothetical. Powell, of course, wasn't the only person who shut off his critical faculties and signed up for the war. Draper devotes entire chapters to the media's and Congress' failure to properly interrogate the rationale for a war. In the major newspapers across the country, intelligence that seemingly confirmed the case that Saddam was a threat was given priority coverage (often leaked by the Bush administration, which then turned around and cited the published stories as independent confirmation of their claims) while doubts were printed on the back-pages. Congress could have imposed conditions on Bush in exchange for authorization of the war, but instead handed him a blank check, after then-Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt cut a deal with the administration that gave them carte blanche to wage war. In the frenzied atmosphere of post-9/11 America, it was easier to be a quiet enabler than a vocal dissenter.

This book isn't the easiest of reads, admittedly. Draper's book takes you deep into the bowels of government bureaucracy, to the point where large sections of the book collapse into a blur of interagency process jostling. It is easy to lose track of the many names, agencies, and committees that you encounter. It's also legitimately hard to tell which of Draper's many (anonymous) sources had genuine doubts about the war and which ones are simply projecting their opposition backwards in time. It's easy to express doubts now that everyone can plainly see what a complete disaster the war turned out to be.

If this all seems like a tedious history lesson in the age of Trump and coronavirus; that we shouldn't rip off the band-aid and just let bygones be bygones, I'd humbly disagree. The Iraq war wasn't just a "mistake" or some garden-variety policy failure. Heck, it's not even like the Trump administration putting immigrant children in cages. This was a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of people, destabilized the Middle East, and weakened trust in American institutions to the point that a reality TV star could present himself to the American people as a savior and somehow win the presidency. It was a *massive* failure that the who's who of the political and media class in this country have direct complicity in. And remarkably, hardly any of the culprits paid any kind of price for it, which is why Bush is now being rehabilitated by liberals as a decent, kindly statesman in contrast to the Bad Orange Man. It's why Iraq war cheerleaders David Frum and Bill Kristol are prominent TV pundits on MSNBC, the putatively progressive TV news network. And it's why the Democratic Party for the second straight election nominated an Iraq war supporter for president. A reckoning is coming for this war, not now, but later, and it'll be long overdue. Draper's comprehensive book shows precisely why.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very frustrating read but a very well written book and was a great companion to reading 500 Days.

This book is clearly exhaustively researched by the author but it’s all conveyed in a very easy to follow way. Draper clearly shows the steps that the Bush administration took that led them to a war that was ultimately unjustified. This book has a narrower scope than 500 Days and think because of that, it can create a much clearer picture of them events in the Bush White House.

I had just turned two a few days before 9/11 happened so obviously I don’t remember it. However, some of my first memories were being extremely upset by news coverage of the Iraq war when I saw it as my parents were watching the nightly news. It would leave me in tears at the end of every day for a period of time. Now that I’m older, it been helpful to me personally to read more about this time period to actually understand what led to me seeing that war on the news.

I would definitely recommend this book if you want to understand the Bush administration’s role in post-9/11 action oversees and how seeking retribution against the perpetrators of that attack was warped into a search for WMDs that did not exist.

[Xavier Patiño · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Iraq War was the conflict of my generation. I was a junior in high school when the Twin Towers were attacked. I watched in numbing horror as the towers collapsed in clouds of smoke and dust. Friends of mine enlisted after graduation and some saw combat (I would’ve signed up if i hadn’t been scared off by the over aggressiveness of the recruiter). At the time, youth and worldly inexperience clouded my understanding of the reasoning behind the conflict.

“We’ve been attacked, and we must take out the evildoers of the world!” was the war cry in the streets.

The Bush Administration sold the populace on the necessity of toppling Hussein. He was a cog in the “axis of evil” and needed to be removed from power; the Iraqis deserved both freedom from tyranny and democracy. We were told that he held weapons of mass destruction and that he wouldn’t hesitate to use them against us.

Anger and fear were the precursors of war. Americans desired vengeance. Cooler heads did not prevail in this case, and not wanting to seem weak, President Bush needed to take someone out.
Months and years after Operation Iraqi Freedom had commenced, it began to dawn on everyone that there were no weapons to be found. No plan to obliterate America. No chemical weapon storages. In fact, Hussein had devolved power to his closest generals and chose to pursue writing fiction and poetry instead of ruling Iraq.

Essentially, Bush surrounded himself with yes-men. His advisors simply stated what they assumed he wanted to hear. Intelligence, even information considered faulty or unreliable, was stretched and molded to fit the narrative. They needed Americans to be on board with the invasion.

At the wars end came the finger-pointing and the passing of blame, and from the ashes of Hussein’s regime arose the terrorist group ISIS. The book doesn’t go into detail on how Iraq is doing today, but if I recall from the news over the years, it isn’t doing well.

It never bloomed into the desert flower of democracy that Bush had hoped for.

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a '00s kid, few questions have consumed my thoughts like the question of why Bush invaded Iraq. It seemed clear in the context of 2004-05 that the case for war was not merely bullshit, but that the Bush administration had to know that it was bullshit. Who could look at a few aluminum tubes and a forged document from Niger and think "Saddam Hussein is close to getting nuclear weapons"? Who could think a secular socialist dictator was in league with Salafists, let alone willing to give them his most prized weapons? Who could think that the best way to deal with that threat, even if it were real, was an outright invasion?

My assumption was there was some real motive that was obscure to me, some broader strategic rationale that for whatever reason could not be articulated to the public. Maybe it was meant as a deterrent to other countries like North Korea or Iran, the same way bombing Nagasaki was meant to show the Soviets how powerful America had become. I wasn't sure on the specifics, but it had to be something. The Bush administration was, I thought, malevolent but not stupid.

Draper's contribution is to demonstrate that not only was there no master theory like that at work, but one was not necessary, because there was barely a conscious decision made to invade Iraq at all. Instead we had a melange of administration actors pursuing their ideological and bureaucratic self-interest in ways that led to an invasion. Paul Wolfowitz was haunted by the failure to depose Hussein in 1991 and through a mixture of ideological conviction, confirmation bias, and outright conspiratorial thinking convinced himself that Hussein was behind every important terrorist attack from the 1993 WTC bombing to 9/11. That put Iraq on the agenda. Bush's personal hatred of Hussein for attempting to kill his father, and his credulity toward Wolfowitz's insane claims of Hussein's terrorist involvement, kept it on the agenda. Before long George Tenet, eager not to lose the "First Customer," was serving up anti-Iraq intelligence and sidelining skeptical intelligence because he thought Bush was already determined to go to war. That intelligence in turn convinced people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice they needed to go along.

It's a tragic string of errors that in no way exculpates the people who made them. Wolfowitz was a crank who belonged shouting in a corner of Hyde Park in London yet somehow reached a position of overwhelming power; Bush was a horrible manager who encouraged groupthink among his deputies; Tenet was an errand boy so desperate to be liked he betrayed his entire agency and sidelined its best analysts; Powell and Rice (and, later, inspectors like Charles Duelfer) were pathetic cowards too scared to leave the administration to confront their president and tell him he was making a huge mistake.

It's a monumental reporting achievement (Draper reports over 300 separate interviews, and from the material he got most of them seem to have stretched on for hours and hours) and until some mass declassifications in the future, likely the best history we'll ever get of the worst foreign policy decision America has made in the last fifty years. It's also breezily and compellingly written; I borrowed it a while back but finished it in two or three sittings. If you're at all interested in the topic, or even just about management techniques and how not to organize and run a large team, it deserves your time.

[Andrés Torres · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, there is no doubt that George W. Bush is an absolute piece of shit. This book is immensely enraging. In To Start a War, Robert Draper manages to show how the Bush administration decided to invade a country based on a fictitious rhetoric that ended up destroying millions of lives. The invasion of Iraq is probably one of the most consequential acts of this century, and this book demonstrates what led to this disastrous decision. It is clear that this administration made everything possible in order to generate a false story about Iraq and its WMD program.

[Cheyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” he memorably quipped, in effect putting the country on notice that America’s hand was off the bicycle seat and whatever happened thereafter was up to the free Iraq.

[Matthew Stagg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reframed my entire understanding of the Iraq war. This should be required reading for every American. Without taking sides, this book does a great job of laying out the comedy of errors (and lies) that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

May be too academic for most casual readers. There are A LOT of names to keep track of.

[MacKenzie Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long, but really informative (and even a little funny) if you read carefully.

[Dan Sasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A piercing and unflinching indictment of the Bush administration’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq. Goes to show, the appointees and hires empowered by an administration are so important. It was an avoidable unmitigated disaster, the consequences of which we are still living through today. Our boys, for whatever reason, are still at bases in Baghdad and could very well come under fire the next time the Israeli’s launch an attack on Tehran. Blows my mind that foreign policy professionals did not think that toppling the Sunni secular dictator in the Shia majority country on Iran’s border would not end up being a gift to the Shia ayatollah. As much as the cabal of neocons have been discredited, to the point where they won’t self identify as a neocon anymore, their policies and attitudes still live on today in the halls of power in DC, and we must push back on their insanity and relentless propaganda before we completely lose what’s left of our great country.

I will write a more thorough review later. Great book to better understand how we ended up invading Iraq when it was obvious to anyone paying attention they had nothing to do with the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was there in 2004. Believed it was a mistake. Still do. Book helps explain how it came to be, sadly.

[David Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

As close as I’ve ever seen to an answer to the basic question about the Iraq War—what were they thinking?—Draper’s account is extraordinarily rich in the details of process that really shape executive branch action.

In the end, though, To Start a War isn’t surprising. It doesn’t seem the war’s about oil, or that anyone ever quite sat down to lie. Really, it seems like great morality tale about intellectual laziness. A lot of powerful people (almost all men) decided they knew what was what, that Saddam had WMD, that we’d be greeted as liberators, that democracy could sprout in a few months, and everyone who could have told them otherwise instead helped protect their little bubble of certainty from being punctured by reality.

Many line analysts knew that whatever piece of the case for war they were assigned to build was bullshit, and said so—but their managers thought their job was to give the president the evidence he wanted for war, and the president, for his part, again and again missed every opportunity to question the evidence he wanted to see—while, Draper says, ably pulling apart arguments he didn’t like.

Not, in the end, too different from the go-along, get-along attitude most accounts of decision making in Vietnam talk about.

After reading it, I don’t think it’s quite fair to say Bush lied, but I do think it’s fair to blame him. There’s a phrase used about intent in the law of murder in a lot of states, which allows people to be convicted either if they set out to commit murder or if they acted “with a depraved indifference to human life.” I don’t think anyone in the Bush administration set out to do evil—but it’s hard not to see their blithe confidence as a depraved indifference to human life.

[Aidan Renaghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can you give 5 stars to something that makes your blood boil? The book is phenomenally readable and well researched. But the fact that any if these people still have a role in public life, let alone continuing to sit in elite positions (Rice was Stanford provost and Wolfowitze was President of the World Bank for God sakes) is a testament to the failure of elite accountability in this country. 500k Iraqi casualties, 50k+ US casualties, and over $2t dollars spent on a lie disproven within days.

[Laura Gersony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really found this book an incredible and inspiring journalistic accomplishment. Though I was surprised that Draper kept his focus almost exclusively inside the Beltway, and never (or only briefly) touched on the moral cause against the war. To me the payoff is still well worth it. And in fairness I know his main focus was the criminal carelessness and hubris of the whole affair, not the horrors of its aftermath for Iraqis. But I would be curious to hear others’ thoughts.

[Ellah Fornillos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Literally slayed. compared to all the other Iraq War books I've read so far this one has the most reflective perspectives along with the best organization for a narrative storytelling. This was read for a class but I could totally see myself reading this as a pleasure book

[Jason Stanford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally well written. Most reviewers focus on Draper's deep research and bracing insights, but the dude knows his way around a sentence. Fun read.

[Anniek · Rating 4 out of 5]

if i launched a war in order to find weapons of mass destruction that turned out to not exist i'd be really embarrassed

[David Gateley · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a strange 9/11 and bush era phase of reading. Criminal stuff here

[lawyergobblesbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Draper is an incredible reporter and writer — the difficulty here is the subject matter. This book is about a slow-motion catastrophe and it took me months to actually finish. I could read yet another on this war’s role in breaking this country into what it is now, and will be.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing was good and the coverage was comprehensive. I was disappointed that there was little coverage of why the actors behaved as they did, not just what they did. I was hoping for something comparable to the Group Think analysis of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Draper's thorough reporting for To Start A War should infuriate you - and perhaps even scare you a bit - as it unravels the depths of zealotry, motivated reasoning, and groupthink that took America to war in Iraq. A must-read for those who care about how government works or rather doesn't work under pressure, and for those who have read books like Superforecasting and want to learn how the intelligence community managed to do the reverse.

[Andrew Tollemache · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in the day, say 2004-2009 there were a ton of what I called "Iraq in a Crack" books that detailed some aspect or all of the catastrophe that was the US Invasion of Iraq. It was great to see Robert Draper re-visit this period of US history with more than a decade from the bloodiest days of the Iraq disaster. Having read a ton of these books before there were no major insights, but Draper provides numerous new details and stories that I missed or had not heard before. IF a reader is new to this topic than I would call this THE starting off point for learning how we got into such a mess

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The majority of Draper’s book focuses on executive branch meetings and decisions related to Afghanistan and Iraq from the start of the Bush administration up to 2007.

A key question in the book, and one I sought an answer to when buying it: ‘When and how did Bush decide to invade Iraq?’

No one decision point was revealed - there was no meeting that culminated in a ‘go’ decision for the invasion. The lack of an airing of dissenting viewpoints was attributable in part to Bush’s CEO presidential style - short meetings with simple recommendations; as a result, there weren’t debates between subordinates at Defense and State where Bush heard disagreement about the wisdom of invading.

Yet at some point, not prior to April 5, 2002 (if his words to Britain’s prime minister were to be believed), a decision was made - the book highlights a key conversation Bush had with Jordan’s King Abdullah on August 1, 2002 in which the President stated the “need to take him [Hussein] down.” Bush’s September 12 speech at the UN calling for a resolution on an inspection regime - which could appear to show openness to a path away from war - was merely a precondition for an invasion, a tactic to expand the coalition joining the U.S. in war. Why did Bush decide on invading? Bush incorrectly perceived Hussein as a ‘despiser of freedom,’ and this seemed to be his main casus belli, with WMD and purported al Qaeda links just part of the communications effort to gain support for the war.

In the end, Bush didn’t seem to know a successful diplomatic process when it occurred in front of his eyes. Ironically, he was largely demonstrating the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy - getting a UN inspection resolution enforced. The book could have been clearer on this, I felt. On page 348, Draper writes that in March 2003 “possibilities of any diplomatic outcome slipped away” yet Hussein had readmitted inspectors into Iraq, cooperated with hundreds of inspection requests, and was allowing aerial flights. The head of inspectors, Hans Blix presented this to UN on February 14, 2003, but there was no evidence that this led to a serious reexamination of the prior intelligence within the Bush administration. The successful capture of the al Qaeda mastermind, Khalid Muhammed, on March 1, 2013 revealed no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 hijacking, yet this similarly seemed to go unremarked by the administration.

The book gives the following profiles of the key players:
Bush - I felt Draper provided a relatively sympathetic view of the President as someone who meant well. Bush’s actions, however, demonstrated hubris. Despite lacking foreign policy experience (for example, not understanding why the religious fundamentalists that made up al Qaeda would not turn to the secular Baathist regime in Iraq as a state sponsor), he seemed incapable of listening to wise advice from more experienced counterparts (e.g., French President Chirac - who knowledgeably said intelligence agencies tend to ‘intoxicate each other’ with worst case scenarios). Bush held a naive worldview of the U.S. as an innocent actor on the world stage and deserving of support, and confused capabilities for intentions (e.g. even if Saddam had WMD, he couldn’t answer the question - what would be his intention of using them?)

Cheney - more experienced in foreign policy than his boss, he was interested in overthrowing Saddam Hussein from the start, but his stated primary motivation became to avert another unexpected attack on the U.S. He would ally with Rumsfeld within the administration, as Rumsfeld showed him deference.

Rumsfeld - his Defense department was given preeminence (over NSC and State), but he is seen as a showboat, a savvy political player seeking to ingratiate himself with his boss while destroying a functioning interagency process, and taking few stands to ensure an effective military campaign in Iraq.

Wolfowitz - he was an early campaign advisor to Bush, and sought to be Defense Secretary, but had to settle for the deputy post. He would be the earliest proponent of overthrowing Hussein, and did not demonstrate competence in his post.

Rice - the most knowledgeable on foreign policy in the administration, yet unsuccessful as National Security Advisor as she gave Bush what he wanted and not what he needed (she didn’t encourage discussion of dissenting views, masking the Powell-Rumsfeld feud from Bush’s view). She would come up with the advice to ‘Punish France, forgive Russia, and ignore Germany.’ Yet she herself seemed subject to this treatment within the administration, where she was ‘outmaneuvered by Cheney, forgiven by Bush, and ignored ‘to the point of rudeness’ by Rumsfeld.’

Powell - seemed to be miscast at State as he was more a ‘good soldier’ who disliked dissenting, and so he followed orders to present the case for war at the fateful U.N. appearance on January 28, 2003. I thought Draper could have presented more about State and Powell’s role.

Tenet - He seemed to perform better before 9/11, as the CIA had created the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo to Bush a month before 9/11. He expected that a hastily-assembled National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq (provided to Congress in October 2002) would be better than honest acknowledgement that the CIA didn’t have the time to provide an accurate product. His desire to protect his hard-won access to Bush led him to accept speculative evidence of Iraqi capabilities, which conformed to the administration’s desire to not underestimate threats. One of the few to show remorse for his mistakes.

Blair - one foreign leader who may have steered Bush away from war, but he wanted to maintain Britain’s influence with the U.S., and also feared Saddam as a threat. He was able to get Bush to go to the UN.

Congress - The topic of chapter 13. Senator Levin (D-MI) and Graham (D-FL) came out as the most skeptical regarding the intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s capabilities, and along with Byrd (D-WV), were the ‘doves’ when it came to an invasion (as was Sen Kennedy (D-MA), though he was not mentioned here). Sen. Biden (D-DE) was seen as favoring a requirement that Bush get a second approval from Congress before invading, and he felt betrayed by Gephardt, who with Lieberman (D-CT), negotiated a ‘blank check’ resolution with the administration. Gephardt, Kerrey (D-NE) and Edwards (D-NC), and to a lesser extent Clinton (D-NY) were the most hawkish on Iraq among the Congressmen that Draper discussed.

Overall, To Start a War, is a very worthwhile account of the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion; an invasion marked by delusions and dishonesty, one of the worst foreign policy courses in U.S. history.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on an epub book instead of Kindle, which I highly don't recommend so might have colored some of my appreciation of it.

It's in some ways even scarier to read this now than it would have been right around the leadup to the Iraq war. Draper shows in engaging but thorough detail how the administration almost from the day after 9/11 had people within it pushing to go to Iraq and how it forced the intelligence services to bend what they were seeing to fit that narrative. How that occurred is particularly troubling. It required cherry picking unverified evidence and then essentially repeating claims and forcing language changes to make the official narratives fit those claims. But the intelligence service was also willing--Tenet comes across particularly poorly as someone who strove to make Bush his customer and seemed all too willing to give the president his raw material and present things how he wanted it to be seen.

The costs of this are catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost, over a trillion dollars wasted, countries ruined.

But it's also a scary lesson in how government can be bent and individual civil servants can't stand up to the weight of all that pressure. One has to wonder what might be going on now that is similar but perhaps not as visible since it is not manifesting as invading a foreign country under false pretenses.

[Ankoor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Draper starts his book with a quote, "A man is not deceived by others; he deceives himself."

Over the next 400 pages Draper shows how (mostly) men deceived themselves into believing war was in America's interest. Whether it was for humanitarian, ideological, or financial reasons, this is an inside account of how America's top officials never questioned their assumptions and let their post-9/11 fears run wild.

Draper illuminates just how easy it is for sound government decision-making to break down when people's mind is already made up. And yet, also shocking how those with concerns about the march to war had the opportunity to speak up but did not out of fear, loyalty, or both.

Unfortunately, the lessons drawn from the Iraq tale have been ignored--government in 2020 routinely ignores facts and basic realities on the ground.

Draper's book unpacks how laudable and patriotic intentions can go so very wrong. Leaders in all types of organizations would be wise to read this book.

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a nightmare of a story this is. This book is at times horrible to read, as you just grimace at the fact that such a delicate moment in history was put in the hands of a group of people so arrogant and dim. The book reads like a novel at times, in the way that Draper fleshes out the personalities of the different people involved in creating the war. It's not just interesting to read - it also makes the story that much more tragic when you realize the kinds of personalities that were involved here. Everybody comes across badly. Draper starts the book with a long chapter about Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who comes across as just a fanatic. He had been obsessed with overthrowing Saddam for about a decade and had all these conspiracy theories that experts all laughed out of the room - until 9/11 happened and he started getting taken seriously by Bush. Cheney and Rumsfeld as well come across as so arrogant. They constantly brush away the many, many people who tell them that the war is a bad idea and they're wrong about Saddam. Rumsfeld apparently wasn't even as hardline anti-Saddam as Cheney was, but he was still arrogant enough to assume he knew better than any of the experts telling him his theories were absurd. You can kind of go through the list like this: Bush comes across as pretty dumb; Tenet comes across as a narcissist; Powell comes across as weak; Blair is introduced as a more moderate voice but he's basically as stubborn as the rest of them.

Draper's clearly a very good journalist, because he gets so many of these little anecdotes and tidbits that do such a good job at illustrating his broader points. I thought one of the most interesting scenes in the book was from a meeting that took place between all of Bush's most senior people right after 9/11. They're talking about how to respond, and then Wolfowitz chimes in and starts to make his case for overthrowing Saddam as the "head of the snake" of global terror. After the meeting, Bush pulls one of his aides aside and says "what am I missing here? Why's he talking about Iraq?" It illustrates how absurd of a non-sequitur the Iraq War was. There was just no connection between 9/11 and Iraq, no matter how hard everybody pretended. At one point shortly after the attacks, Cheney goes to the CIA and asks them to look into whether Iraq was involved. It obviously wasn't; one of the analysts present is quoted as saying "it's like asking if Belgium did this." Cheney assumes this means that CIA analysts are hopelessly naive and biased. You get this pattern all throughout the book. Every time somebody from the Bush administration uses some assumption or piece of intelligence to justify the war, you get to see the horror and exasperation of experts for whom this was obviously all wrong. What becomes clear in the way that Draper lays everything out is that it never really mattered. The intelligence wasn't there to inform their decisions; it was there to justify decisions that had already been made. The CIA's official National Intelligence Estimate for Iraq's weapons capabilities wasn't commissioned until a month before Congress voted to authorize military force in October 2002. The likes of Rumsfeld had already fought to make sure that it included language about what Iraq "might" or "could" do, rather than what it was actually doing or likely to do. At one point, one of the authors of the NIE asks an analyst how big Saddam's chemical weapons stockpile is. The analyst responds that he might not have any, and the author says something like "that's not very helpful if our assessment is already that he has some." In the end, the NIE doesn't mention anything about the possibility of Saddam not having anything.

It's a sad story. Many people have taken blame for the war (and Draper argues that they certainly deserve some) but ultimately he says that it's really just about Bush. I think that's fair. Bush maybe doesn't seem as cynical or ideological as Cheney and the DOD but he just seems so out of his depth. That's not to say he didn't behave cynically - he was clearly also responsible for marginalizing people that didn't tell him what he wanted to hear. But he was famously inexperienced in foreign policy and that really comes through. There's a line in the book about how he didn't really understand anti-Americanism and the causes of 9/11 and I think that seems right. He only really talks in these vague platitudes about how they hate us for our freedom. Maybe he was only saying that because it sounds good politically but Draper seems to argue he genuinely believed it, and it comes across as a little embarrassing. It's the same thing when Bush tries to plan for post-Saddam Iraq. He assumes that the Americans would be greeted as liberators and the Iraqis would easily set up a democracy. He thought the Sunnis and Shiites would put aside their differences out of this shared love of freedom, instead of descending into civil war which is what actually ended up happening. As much as the people in this book acted out of bad faith and fundamentally hawkish ideologies, there's also so much ignorance. Apparently Saddam thought 9/11 would bring the US and Iraq together. Saddam led a secular government and hated Islamic extremism, which he saw as a threat to his rule. Experts in the region kept trying to explain this to Bush and his people; there's just no connection between the two. But it doesn't seem like anybody cared, and it led to them going ahead with this devastating war against the literal cradle of civilization. It's a sad book, but it's really interesting.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't really know where to begin with this book. In many ways, the Iraq war was one of the most important events of my early adult life. It started when I was still in college and continued through several jobs of varying levels of import until my current one. In some sense, in the existence of ISIS and ISIS-related combat in Syria, as well as in our continued inability to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan (whose fate we neglected for nearly a decade while prosecuting the terribly planned and utterly unnecessary Iraq war), the Iraq war continues to this day. Some of my first writings around national security and defense to be published (in the Saint Anselm College student paper, 'The Crier') were around the run-up to the war. In particular, I wrote, what in retrospect was an incredibly ignorant piece arguing in favor of the war on the grounds that the United States should be promoting democracy and Saddam's defiance of UN resolutions around WMD represented an opportunity to replace a terrible dictatorship with a democratic state. The one minor piece of foresight I did write about was that while the initial invasion would likely be easy, winning the peace would be difficult.

This book, deeply reported and carefully researched, both brought so much back from those frightening days following 9/11 but also put in perspective how much the world has changed in the intervening nineteen years. The story of the steady progress of poorly verified and unsupported intelligence through the CIA and into the White House is appalling. The motivated reasoning of men like Paul Wolfowitz and George W. Bush seems even more inexcusable when the flimsy and fabricated nature of their justifications is carefully exposed. This war was a mistake, the people who argued for it failed utterly in making an honest case for it and then furthered their failure through abysmal planning for any post-war transition, resulting in waves of unrest that continue to this day.

At the same time, the problems facing the country are just so much more manageable it's almost endearing. There is no question the United States can invade Iraq on its own with minimal outside support (Tony Blair comes in for no favors and the UK made contributions, but their impact on this narrative is more passenger in the crash than navigator). Domestically, Congress doesn't stand up to the president, but the ability to finance the war and manage its impact is assumed.

How different is the world today, where the United States is deeply riven domestically into two fiercely competing party bases whose views of the world are almost completely opposed. Even were the United States to somehow find the domestic harmony to engage in a major foreign policy endeavor, decades of massive deficits and lack of investment in infrastructure have hollowed out America's economic primacy. Militarily, the trillions of dollars burned in Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) have hastened the eclipse of our primacy and created a world where Chinese forces are steadily moving to surpass American capabilities in any number of fields. Simply put, the United States can no longer engage in a major overseas venture as doing so would make it incapable of deterring its great power competitor should it attempt to engage in a forceful renegotiation of the status quo.

Indeed, there are reasons to question if the United States could even muster the forces to prevent such a renegotiation if it wanted to. The United States faces real challenges and threats that make the issue of the Bush administration's myopic focus on Iraq seem practically picayune. Whether our domestic institutions are even capable of attempting to meet these challenges is terrifyingly unclear. 'To Start a War' is a depressing, difficult read but even in assessing the clear failures of the Bush administration, it's most damning impact is to make clear how small those threats actually were and highlight how much more serious they are today.