02931cam a2200337 i 4500 434129228 TxGeo 20200824120000.0 200115s2020||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2020001715 9780525561040 hbk. 0525561048 hbk. (OCoLC)1164696887 TxGeo rda Draper, Robert. To start a war : how the Bush Administration took America into Iraq / Robert Draper. How the Bush Administration took America into Iraq. New York, NY : Penguin Press, 2020. xiv, 480 pages ; 25 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Includes index. "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 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. 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 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"-- Provided by publisher. 20200908. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946- Military leadership. Iraq War, 2003-2011 Causes. Iraq War, 2003-2011 Decision making. United States Politics and government 2001-2009. QS5