In the midterm election year 2010, recession-battered Americans expressed their discontent with a simultaneously overreaching and underperforming government by turning the formerly Democratically controlled House over to the Republicans. House of Representatives-a large, often unruly body of men and women elected every other year from 435 distinct microcosms of America-has achieved renown as “the people’s House,” the world’s most democratic institution, and an acute Rorschach of biennial public passions. Vice President Dick Cheney was allowed to make misleading or false public statements without correction.Īs we continue to live through the ripple effects of this momentous decision in American foreign policy, Draper’s revelatory account deserves a wide readership.The U.S. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld seemed to give more importance to finding fault with other government agencies and micromanaging his department than to urgent follow-through. For example, there was no plan for what to do following a military victory. There really was not a process, Draper reveals. He also makes extensive use of recently released documents to give a vivid picture of how events unfolded. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell thought invading Iraq was a foolish idea, when the president asked him to make the case before the United Nations, he went along.ĭraper’s exhaustive research includes interviews with key figures such as Powell, Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice, as well as dozens of others from the CIA and the State and Defense Departments. Eventually, the president needed to know if what the CIA had was sufficient to persuade the public that the “Iraqi threat” justified war. should use that “fact” to oust Hussein.ĬIA analysts tried to give the president what he wanted. Bush and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted, for their own reasons, to believe the weapons were there and that the U.S. Even so, the case for Hussein possessing more of these weapons was based on badly outdated information, almost all circumstantial and often fabricated. Saddam Hussein denied having weapons of mass destruction, but he had used them in the past, and his government had repeatedly lied about them, so his past behavior did raise some questions.

However, as Robert Draper demonstrates in his compelling and richly documented To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq, in reality, imagination drove the policy. The mistakes in judgment that led to the United States invasion of Iraq have frequently been described as a failure of the imagination.

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