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To Start a War
- How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
Critic reviews
"Authoritative...The most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today." (Los Angeles Times)
"A timely reminder of the dangers of embarking upon wars that can imperil America itself.” (The New York Times)
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Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: Defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off-course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives.
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Eye-Opening Book
- By David J Ray on 09-01-21
By: Craig Whitlock, and others
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Known and Unknown
- A Memoir
- By: Donald Rumsfeld
- Narrated by: Donald Rumsfeld
- Length: 30 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful memoir from the late former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. With the same directness that defined his career in public service, Rumsfeld's memoir is filled with previously undisclosed details and insights about the Bush administration, 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also features Rumsfeld's unique and often surprising observations on eight decades of history. Both a fascinating narrative and an unprecedented glimpse into history, Known and Unknown captures the legacy of one of the most influential men in public service.
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Inside view of five decades in politics
- By Brooks on 02-19-11
By: Donald Rumsfeld
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Confront and Conceal
- Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power
- By: David E. Sanger
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 15 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Three and a half years ago, David Sanger’s book The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power described how a new American president came to office with the world on fire. Now, just as the 2012 presidential election battle begins, Sanger follows up with an eye-opening, news-packed account of how Obama has dealt with those challenges, relying on innovative weapons and reconfigured tools of American power to try to manage a series of new threats.
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Sobering reminder on what the presidency requires
- By Marilyn on 09-03-12
By: David E. Sanger
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In My Time
- A Personal and Political Memoir
- By: Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann, Dick Cheney
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
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In his unmistakable voice and with an insider's eye on history, former Vice President Dick Cheney tells the story of his life and the nearly four decades he has spent at the center of American politics and power. In My Time is truly the last word about an incredible political era, by a man who lived it and helped define it - with courage and without compromise.
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Great Book
- By reader on 09-05-11
By: Dick Cheney, and others
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The One Percent Doctrine
- Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
- By: Ron Suskind
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Abridged
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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Ron Suskind takes you deep inside America's real battles with violent, unrelenting terrorists, a game of kill-or-be-killed, from the Oval Office to the streets of Karachi.
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The Agenda is Clear
- By Penny on 09-28-11
By: Ron Suskind
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Gambling with Armageddon
- Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis
- By: Martin J. Sherwin
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
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In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials, and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union — triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest....
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Important History
- By J. B. Evans on 06-12-21
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From Warsaw with Love
- Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance
- By: John Pomfret
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.
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Superb - All Americans should know about its recent and colonial history if strayegic partnership with the USA
- By zephyr99 on 07-08-23
By: John Pomfret
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Legacy of Ashes
- The History of the CIA
- By: Tim Weiner
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 21 hrs and 37 mins
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This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For the last 60 years, the CIA has maintained a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, never disclosing its blunders to the American public. It spun its own truth to the nation while reality lay buried in classified archives. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Tim Weiner offers a stunning indictment of the CIA, a deeply flawed organization that has never deserved America's confidence.
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Flawed but Important
- By Michael on 07-18-08
By: Tim Weiner
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Hubris
- The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
- By: Michael Isikoff, David Corn
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This fast-paced, behind-the-scenes narrative tells the inside story of how the Bush administration used bad intelligence to sell and then justify the Iraq war. Veteran reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn take the reader behind the scenes at the White House, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Congress, where controversial decisions and turf battles were fought in the highest circles of the Bush administration.
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Hubris
- By Pamela on 12-19-06
By: Michael Isikoff, and others
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Duty
- Memoirs of a Secretary at War
- By: Robert M. Gates
- Narrated by: George Newbern, Robert M. Gates
- Length: 25 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he'd long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.
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The Fighting Season
- By Cynthia on 01-28-14
By: Robert M. Gates
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The Man Who Ran Washington
- The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
- By: Peter Baker, Susan Glasser
- Narrated by: Michael Quinlan
- Length: 26 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a pause-resisting portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations.
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We Need Baker Now More Than Ever
- By @Gazi2a on 01-08-21
By: Peter Baker, and others
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Days of Fire
- Bush and Cheney in the White House
- By: Peter Baker
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 29 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. In Days of Fire, Peter Baker chronicles the history of the most consequential presidency in modern times through the prism of its two most compelling characters, capturing the elusive and shifting alliance of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney as no historian has done before.
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A balanced account of the W and Cheney White House
- By Scott on 11-15-13
By: Peter Baker
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Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.
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What listeners say about To Start a War
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- Extinction
- 01-21-21
Lest we forget a previous inept administration
With all of the scandal and chaos from the last few years we sometimes forget how truly incompetent Bush and his cronies were in the early 2000s. This book is an informed and depressing peek inside the white house that led to the total destruction of two nations, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the eventual destabilization of an entire region (not even counting the home front costs).
The narration wasn't bad but I did have to dock some stars for poor pronunciation. For instance he pronounced "Baathist" with a long "baaa," like one is mimicking a sheep sound. It really breaks the immersion.
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- John David
- 08-31-20
Powerful but Painful History
A riveting, dismaying & infuriating account of how the George W. Bush administration took America into the Iraq War. There was no George Ball, who forcefully advised LBJ against Vietnam escalation. Tragic failure all around. Bush & Cheney foremost, but the whole bunch, including Colin Powell. Well-paced, well-presented & well-read. It is shorter, more reportorial & less stylistically literary than The Best & The Brightest, but one has much the same reaction upon reading it. A powerful, but painful history. Here's hoping that this time America learns its lessons.
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- aaron
- 08-22-20
Should be required reading in all high schools nationwide
I’ve always held the firm belief that the blissfully idealistic days of wanting our presidents to be forces for good and righteousness in the world ended with JFK. Since Kennedy, a president’s legacy can fairly be judged by two criteria:
1. How many catastrophically bad decisions did they make, and
2. How many (if any) innocents Americans were needlessly killed or maimed due to these bad decisions.
Going by this metric, George W. and Trump are/were human dumpsterfires as president.
This book lays out in great detail the pointless, totally unnecessary war that George W. started in Iraq, for no reason other than a petty familial feud and a deep loathing for Saddam Hussein.
Not one American soldier should’ve lost their life because of a family feud. We are not living in the Dark Ages.
People need to know about what happened.
People need to read this book.
This book tells the apocryphal story of what happens when a president has his mind already made up on a potentially catastrophic course of action, and ignores the Smartest People in the Room who constantly advise him against it.
The similarities between Bush’s evidence-free insistence that Iraq was somehow an existential threat to America has so many similarities to Trump’s insistence that Covid was no big deal, that it’s not even worth mentioning. But, I mention it anyways, because I’m old enough to still remember a time when we as a nation, as well as our leaders, actually LEARNED from history. We learned from past mistakes.
Those days are over.
Equally as depressing, the days of wondering if the villains of this story - Cheney, Wolfy, Rumsfeld, and Bush - would face any consequences for needlessly ruining the lives of thousands of brave American servicemen are over as well. They will face no punishment. If anything, each of those men only became wealthier and even more powerful from their devious scheme. They live in luxury while the lives they needlessly ruined are buried in the sand.
History has (justifiably) ridiculed and castigated Hitler for starting a war under the false pretense that “Jews ruined Germany.” Yet none of America’s intellectuals or common folk seem to care one iota that Bush started a war under the false pretense of “Saddam is going to attack America with nukes and/or poison gas if we don’t hit him first.” I don’t know what the rationale is for castigating Hitler while praising Bush for essentially starting fire to the same kindling, but I’m all ears if someone would like to explain it to me.
This is one of the most important books of the year, and if there is a God, a few million Americans will read/listen to it, and take its message to heart.
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- Bill
- 06-05-22
Tour de force of lead up to Iraq war
Such an excellent Review of events leading up to Americas entry to the Iraq war. This brings back many memories in an compelling g style. Not just a chronological review but rather an excellent history on how we got there. Five stars.
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- Lockon
- 06-30-21
a great story of made up minds
I wanted to read this book because of my beliefs and the reason for the second Gulf War. I'm a skeptic of pretty much everything and so although I had my ideas of the reasons which I had accumulated from years of listening to the news and other sources, this book essentially confirmed the bulk of it. It was very interesting and deeply disturbing to learn more of the details and especially the thought process by the individuals involved.
The book is a very good lesson to learn about ulterior motives of people who should be vetted better and how it plays into people who have preconceived ideas about things which they should not carry into their professional capacity.
And although the book was kind on Bush and seemed to indicate otherwise, it was clear that he was also very manipulated by those under him.
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- G.R. Davidson
- 09-14-20
great reporting, a case study in poor leadership
Draper does an incredible job showing in great detail how the Bush administration failed to foster culture of pursuing the truth. this book reads like a thriller and even though I knew what the outcome would be I had a hard time putting it down. there are a lot of organizational and personal details but the overall story is such a powerful leadership lesson. I highly recommend.
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- Natalie Herman
- 03-23-21
One of history's darkest comedies
Throughly researched and terrifying in its indictments. It's not an easy listen, but very much worth it
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- Rony
- 09-24-20
My first book on tape
I really liked this book and the was it was presented. It presents striking facts about the issue from a non-biased perspective.
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- Alexander Betzel
- 09-21-22
Like a Greek Tragedy
Explores the hubris and failings of the Bush administration and the intelligence community in shoring up support for and preparing for the invasion of Iraq. It's heartbreaking to see the personal bickering and ostrich behavior that senior members of the administration took.
The book shows that the war failed on all fronts (I served tours in Iraq. I don't think this is controversial), even as the goal posts shifted. Rationale after rationale is referred untenable ultimately leaving justification for the war in strange personal goals of senior administration members.
I loved the book as an exploration of both bureaucratic failures and personal shortcomings of a presidential administration.
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- Marynelle
- 09-04-20
If you’ve grown weary of the current GOP administration’s incompetence...
Come spend 15 hours learning about the arrogance and duplicity of the last one. Great book. Captures the group-think and bureaucratic bungling that can lead to a terrible decision in hindsight, foresight, and plain sight.
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2 people found this helpful