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 PostFrom
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.
