Lies and mistakes behind George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq war laid bare in stunning new book
- Robert Draper’s To Start a War depicts a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 terror and paranoia
- Warnings were ignored and falsehoods accepted to back a disastrous campaign that would last eight years and leave 4,500 Americans dead
To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq, by Robert Draper, Penguin, 4 stars
After the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001, a blue-ribbon commission and congressional committees uniformly blamed the US national security apparatus for failing to “connect the dots” of evidence that might have exposed Osama bin Laden’s plot.
Less than two years later, then president George W. Bush launched a ruinous war in Iraq based on a far greater intelligence failure, one that saw the CIA, Pentagon and other agencies effectively make up the evidence that the White House sought to justify invading a country that had not attacked – or even threatened to attack – the United States.
The serial mistruths, mistakes and misperceptions about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged support for al-Qaeda are laid out in devastating detail in Robert Draper’s authoritative new book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.
This is well-trodden history, but Draper mines newly declassified documents and tracks down previously unavailable CIA and defence officials to flesh out the sordid story of the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the start of a grinding conflict that would last eight years and claim nearly 4,500 American lives.
Why now? Two decades on, there are no new headlines to be pulled from the toxic personal and policy disputes of the Bush era. But Draper has written a compelling narrative of just how calamitous an ideology-first approach to fact-finding can be in the White House, and why Americans were so badly deluded.