New Book
“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.
About the Author:
Robert Draper is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer for National Geographic Magazine. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. He lives in Washington D.C. with his fiancé, Kirsten Powers.
To Start a War by Robert Draper, read by Stefan Rudnicki
To Start a War by Robert Draper Reviews:
“A piercing, unprecedented account by one of the great journalists of our time about the George W. Bush administration’s chaotic decisions and indecisions, the people who tried to keep us out and the charlatans who snookered others that led to the most consequential foreign policy fiasco in modern history.” —Elizabeth Drew, author of fourteen books, including Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption and Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall
“The full measure of America’s misadventure in Iraq has finally been weighed in this wise, unsparing, and invaluable narrative. Deeply researched and crisply written, To Start a War stands among the best works of history in modern times.” —Lawrence Wright, author, The End of October
Own this book? See if Mybookcart is buying To Start a War by Robert Draper. Sell your book for cash.
