To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq by Robert Draper"In the aftershocks of 9/11,a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males." I was alive, sentient and angry during the Bush Administration's buildup to the invasion of Iraq, so I'm not sure exactly why I read this book: It just made me angry all over again. Read a certain way, though, it's almost darkly comedic -- like an episode of The Office, only one where hundreds of thousands of people end up dead unnecessarily. Above all, one of the key errors highlighted in this narrative is a sort of neediness -- the CIA needing to be relevant to the "First Customer" or be left behind, and so furnishing Bush with the (as it turns out) intelligence he (and they) wanted to see; Tony Blair's need in his faded empire to be relevant to an American-led world order; Colin Powell's need to not lose his standing in the administration and thus selling himself (and the world) out with his U.N. speech; even the need of certain media members to prove their status in the pecking order. "Careers could be made by wars," Draper notes. "It was equally true that wars could be made my careerists, including those in newsrooms." What a disaster. What an absolute disaster.
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