To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
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To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Robert Draper (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator), Penguin Audio (Publisher)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 307 ratings
Editors' pick Best History
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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 Post)

From the author of the New York Times best seller 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 15 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.

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  1. Listening Length
    15 hours and 30 minutes
  2. Author
    Robert Draper
  3. Narrator
    Stefan Rudnicki
  4. Audible release date
    July 28, 2020
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Penguin Audio
  7. ASIN
    B081HG14YQ
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 15 hours and 30 minutes
Author Robert Draper
Narrator Stefan Rudnicki
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date July 28, 2020
Publisher Penguin Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B081HG14YQ
Best Sellers Rank #61,700 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#19 in Military Public Policy
#35 in Iraq War
#67 in 21st Century History

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
307 global ratings
Mr. Robert Draper omits significant facts.
1 Star
Mr. Robert Draper omits significant facts.
Mr. Robert Draper omits significant facts: hijackers alive — to this day we don't have the airlines' passenger lists.FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt (BBC News, Sep 13, 2001). There were no Arab names on the passenger lists for the planes allegedly used on 9/11 (Associated Press, Sep 17, 2001). Several "hijackers" have been reported to be alive (Telegraph, Sep 23, 2001). “Hijack 'suspects' alive and well” (BBC News, Sep 23, 2001).The war on Afghanistan seemed to follow the script written by The Project for the New American Century (Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Sep 2000) — prepared by the neocons.Award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker, John Pilger, wrote (Dec 16, 2002): In the hours immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks . . . Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be “a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism.” The president allegedly replied that “public opinion has to be prepared be- fore a move against Iraq is possible”.In June 2005, Michael Smith, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London, revealed the secret Downing Street memo, dated July 23, 2002, outlining an agreement between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair to fix the facts and intelligence on Iraq.The 9/11 Commission’s chairman Thomas H. Kean and vice-chairman Lee H. Hamilton have written that they were “setup to fail” (Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, 2007). Senator Max Cleland resigned from the 9/11 Commission saying “It’s a scam”. Senator Bob Kerrey “threatened to resign”.TRUMP on September 11, 2001 while discussing what caused the World Trade Center 1 and 2 to collapse told Fox5NY ”they had bombs”.President George W. Bush claimed “he was told by God to invade Iraq and attack Osama bin Laden’s stronghold of Afghanistan” (Independent, Oct 7, 2005).
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Top reviews from the United States

Patrick D. Mahaney
5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written and in-depth review
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2020
Verified Purchase
I agree with most of the other commentators - there is no one to blame but President Bush's lack of judgment, lack of fundamental understanding, lack of ability to question and discern, and lack of a basic level of intelligence to distinguish the truth from falsity. As many commentators point out, Bush was a self-described "anti-intellectual" and parodied himself as being "mis-underestimated." He was "the Decider" as he frequently claimed. Once a decision was formed, no matter the basis, it was going to be done. It was just that simple. Was President Bush as simple-minded as portrayed by the press and national media? No, probably not, but he was no intellect either. More likely, he was intellectually lazy, and did not spend time to read or study any serious written works on the subject, and he certainly did not read any of the detailed intelligence products that were available; it was all his instinct on what was right or wrong.

Bush surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men; any independent thinking or a contrary opinion to the group-think attitude of the Bush team was dismissed and the speaker banned or excluded from participation in any further decision making. As example, SecDef Rumsfeld's crass and imperious public dismissal of then Army Chief of Staff Shenseki's testimony at a Congressional hearing that an occupation force may require 200,000 soldiers was publicly trashed, and Shenseki quickly pushed into retirement. [In fact, Shenski was close to the number - the U.S. Army deployed more troops post-invasion than during the invasion; 150,000 to 180,000 soldiers were deployed during the period 2005 to 2008 in various efforts to pacify the country in contrast to the 130,000 deployed in the actual invasion.]

I served in Iraq Dec. 2004-May 2006 as part of the U.S. State Department mission to Iraq and have never quite understood the mission. There never was "command guidance" given to the service members; certainly, no command guidance was given to my sector. There was no coordination between national level assets; grandiose plans were announced at the highest levels, then completely altered or discarded less than six months later; the State Department was continually fighting and undermining the Defense Department and vice versa; waste and profligacy of resources was apparent during the entire time I was in-country. Private contractors were handed millions upon millions in no-bid contracts. It was waste, fraud, and abuse of the tax-payer at the highest levels. Fundamentally, the entire Iraq war was just a poorly thought-out, poorly conducted operation for the unnecessary goal of regime change.

The Iraq War should never have been fought and we, the U.S. citizens, have lost thousands of good service members and over $3 trillion in assets as the consequence. To Start a War should serve as a reminder to future administrations of how faulty planning based on ill-conceived underlying beliefs and assumptions can quickly turn out disastrously wrong. It is, in some sense, along the same lines as Barbara Tuchman's classic book The Guns of August (1962) - once the decision to mobilize was given by the Kaiser, World War I was inevitable and the slaughter could not be stopped. Once the Bush team had decided to invade Iraq, there was no turning back and there were no dissenting voices within the cabinet. It was just bad decisions piled on top of faulty assumptions and poor choices. Good book and recommended.
12 people found this helpful
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Doug G
5.0 out of 5 stars Don't cook the intel!
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2020
Verified Purchase
Robert Draper’s “To Start a War” is the best so far of the Gulf War II histories that detail the lead-up to war during the 18 months after 9/11. Bob Woodward set the bar in 2004 with “Plan of Attack.” Sixteen years later Draper plows the same ground just as readably and in far greater depth. He aims to explain the “riddle” of how the U.S went from 9/11 to invading Iraq, a country that didn’t seem to have it coming: [It] …was an act of war against a sovereign nation that had neither harmed the United States nor threatened to do so” (pg xiii). How did the U.S let 2,977 deaths on 9/11 lead to its inflicting over 400,000 on Iraq? (That’s a high-end estimate, by the way, but the exact number is not the point.) You need not accept the author’s moral stance nor his analysis of the Iraq threat to admire this fine book.

“To Start a War” is based largely on primary sources, on interviews and memoirs. Draper’s genius is his retelling of the principals’ tales—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet—while weaving in material from CIA analysts and others at work deep in the bureaucracy. Those in the trenches had the burden of sorting out the intelligence while being pestered by the likes of Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Draper’s telling of this intel war is the book’s best part. Intelligence did get thoroughly abused, both down in the trenches and on high. But it wasn’t so simple as the Bush Administration telling simple lies.

Draper’s riddle has to do with casus belli in the accelerated modern age, and how democratically elected governments properly go about persuading their people to fight wars of choice. The Bush Administration’s real reason for deposing Saddam was the threat his regime posed by its mere existence—undeniably (in Bush view) over the medium and longer term; maybe at the moment as well, but that was hard to nail down. For Iraq War hawks, a sanctions-free, oil-rich Iraq would inevitably reconstitute its military, including WMD, and get back to its bad old ways. Depose Saddam now, in the shadow of 9/11, or later rue the consequences. But Americans are not easily prodded into vague wars of choice, even after 9/11. By about September 2002, the Bush Administration’s marketing strategy for war settled firmly on WMD, terrorism, and imminent threat. A stretch, but those who “knew” Saddam, just “knew” he had at least a small cache of chemical rounds stashed somewhere. Invade Iraq; find that cache; and all pans out for shady, shaky marketing strategy. Surprise, no WMD. (OK, a few rounds but not a cache.) Saddam had not behaved as assessed. Very strange for those who “knew” Saddam. Might he have reconstituted his WMD if left alone? Yes, Saddam told his interrogators, that was the plan. But how to weigh the pain of miserable present war against what might have been?

Whose idea was that marketing strategy anyway? Hard to say. Draper catalogues the contorted ways that dozens of players, President down to lowly analysts, wrestled with intelligence “facts” trying to build the case for war. The real sins were not so much faulty individual judgments, but using the Intelligence Community to justify an optional war, pressuring it to highlight the most alarming interpretations, squashing dissent, cherry-picking intelligence, and neglecting context. Draper’s book makes clear that not a lot of lying of the conventional sort went on. Rather, there were lies of omission, silencing of inconvenient voices, not speaking up when one’s job was on the line-the U.S was going to war anyway, why make waves.

Maybe no 9/11, had sheltering Bin Ladin been casus belli for Clinton to depose the Taliban in 1998 after al-Qaida’s East Africa embassy bombings. We can’t know the alternate history. What might have been, had Saddam had remained in power? Probably not pretty. “To Start a War” does make clear that democratically elected governments are better off selling their wars of choice with the truth—such as it is—not with cooked up imminent threats.
15 people found this helpful
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J G
4.0 out of 5 stars Knowledgeable & comprehensive but writing is a bit too ponderous.
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2022
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Self education.
One person found this helpful
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Jim C
5.0 out of 5 stars The Best and the Brightest of the 2020s
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2023
Verified Purchase
Reading this book - I had deja vue with Haldermans classic “The Best and the Brightest” about how Kennedy’s cabinet, the best and the brightest screwed up Vietnam. Reading this book, you will ask yourself how can smart people be so stupid (as they pursue a vision indepdent of facts and data. It is amazing that the best and the brightest people creating US policy repeat the same mistakes (for both Democratic and Republican presidents). An amazing story - very thankful that the author captured it.

We need more people with honesty, bravery and common sense in government to say “No” this policy does not reflect the data and a new policy should be adapted. There were many people in George W Bush cabinet that knew invading Iraq was a bad idea but they all joined the train and did not uphold their convictions. A shocking and valuable story.
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Boris B
5.0 out of 5 stars Incompetence so strong it'll make your head spin
Reviewed in Canada on August 9, 2023
Verified Purchase
I came into this with little knowledge about the Iraq war and the events that led to it, only knowing that it was a grave mistake and a very recent stain on America's foreign policy.

What Robert Draper describes in this book is a dangerous cohort of officials masquerading as a decent decisionmakers. The people in the upper crust had their own bones to pick with Iraq stemming from personal biases or old, outdated beliefs. This is basically everyone that had a hand in American foreign policy. Those that didn't were quickly dismissed or strung along into believing it, whether sincerely or for their own gain and continued employment. It is just constant confirmation bias all the way down. This doesn't even touch George W. Bush, who you may have sympathy for early on. This sympathy is quashed later when you realize how little he did to prevent dangerous ideas from creeping through, which he could have stopped as commander-in-chief if he had been more aware, more hands-on, more knowledgeable about everything. Sadly, he was not, and this is how you have evil ideas voiced by powerful people become horrific events.

In terms of writing quality I found Draper to be engaging. At few points do things get boring and I think he does a good job of maintaining attention. He covers many key players in the administration and how they came to power and their beliefs, before delving into the events of 9/11 and the administration's relatively unimpeded decision to invade Iraq. Be prepared that a significant portion of this book is just about the events leading up to Iraq. And while there is some focus on the actual war itself and the second term of the Bush presidency, they are dwarfed by events happening before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think this is pretty clear based on the title of the book and the marketing but it is something to reiterate. Additionally, single moments of the war are not really discussed in great detail (the troop surge, Abu Ghraib, etc.) but they are brought up and have their moment. Draper's sources list is exhaustive, so you have a very well-rounded view of the lead-up to the war in my opinion.

I came away from this book infuriated at the incompetency of the administration and the infighting that takes place between agencies headed by big egos. It was endlessly frustrating to read about the powerful pro-war figures relying on false intelligence and personal beliefs. A big takeaway from this book is that there are many people in the departments and agencies who have great doubt about intelligence claims, who do their best to change the minds of those in positions in power. But as I said earlier, these didn't work out. Do not believe that everyone was mindlessly following along.

Overall I really enjoyed this book and appreciate how it broadened my knowledge of the events that led up to the war.
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Leser
5.0 out of 5 stars Lohnend
Reviewed in Germany on January 21, 2023
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Ein Lehrstück, wie eine disfunktionale Regierung die Nation in einen Krieg führt. Der Autor zeigt, wie man sich seine eigenen Ängste, Vorurteile und Selbstüberschätzung so einredet, dass man sie glaubt. Es geht also nicht primär darum, dass dieser verbrecherische Angriffskrieg auf Lügen aufgebaut war, sondern darum, dass die wesentlichen Akteure das wirklich geglaubt haben. Barbara Tuchmans "Guns of August" für unsere Zeit.
One person found this helpful
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DM
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2021
Verified Purchase
I didn't realise how new the book and was very happy with its condition. Definitely worth the money.
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Peter
4.0 out of 5 stars A well-researched book on the road to the Iraq war
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 28, 2022
Verified Purchase
Mr Draper's book, "To Start a War", is probably the best one I have read concerning the Bush administration's decision to go to war on Iraq in 2003. It is rich with many details surrounding the movements within the White House, State Department and the Pentagon on the course that would ultimately see American and British troops oust the Saddam regime.
The author certainly dug deep to bring the interactions of those in power to life. It was a rewarding read, and gave me further insight into this controversial conflagration.
2 people found this helpful
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