To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq
By Robert Draper
Penguin Press, 2020

“This is a story bracketed by the two defining tragedies of the twenty-first century,” writes Robert Draper at the start of his new book, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq. “The first was an unprovoked attack on America’s homeland that left nearly three thousand dead. The second, eighteen months later, was an act of war by America against a sovereign nation that had neither harmed the United States nor threatened to do so.” 

Draper, author of one of the best books yet written about the second President Bush (2008’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush), expresses the perhaps forlorn hope that his new book will encourage a more balanced historical view of George W. Bush, who left office under a dark cloud largely generated by his taking of the country into an open-ended war under flagrantly false pretenses. Draper obliquely acknowledges that subsequent events have conspired to make the whole Bush family look better in retrospect, and although this is certainly true - George W. Bush being a stubborn dimwit but not a free-associating sociopathic monster - it can’t possibly save this book from old and not-so-old angers, as Draper must know better than anybody. 

Those old angers will be stirred to resurgent heat by Draper’s decision to center so much of his narrative on Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon architect who in the minds of many people epitomized both the imbecilic vandalism of the Iraq War and the weasley unaccountability of its main advocates (excepting perhaps Dick Cheney, who, like Bush, didn’t directly participate in Draper’s book - and excepting unlikely war hawk Christopher Hitchens, who attributed to Wolfowitz “almost a quarter-century of being essentially right”). Wolfowitz figures on almost every page of To Start a War, and although Draper is far too wise an old fox to lapse into ventriloquism - at the end of the book, it is still eminently possible to loathe Wolfowitz - there’s an inevitable coloring of the familiar narrative. 

Draper is a consistently vivid writer, employing throughout a pugnacious journalistic tone that can at times leave bruises:

All traffic stopped. The subway trains stopped. Cell service stopped. The taxis disappeared. More bodies dropped out of the two flaming buildings. From the wreckage, hundreds upon hundreds of office workers staggered uptown or over the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, covered head to toe in ashes. Crying, screaming, the wailing of sirens. A monstrous white cloud rose up as the South Tower crumbled to the ground. Then the North Tower collapsed. New York’s skyline was decapitated.

The events that unfold from that decapitation will be grimly familiar to people who watched the news at the time. While the nation was reeling, the Bush administration busily set the machinery of war in motion - not against the nation’s attackers, but against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. News clips began to circulate showing US soldiers stalking through harsh Iraqi landscapes grunting “I’m here because of 9-11,” and Bush trafficked terrifyingly in a kind of proto-fascist “if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists” rhetoric that was stark for 2002, no matter how quaint it might seem to Americans in 2020. 

Draper’s narrative brings it all back as vividly as any book has done in over a decade. This is a layered, multi-faceted account of a diplomatic, political, and military disaster, a veritable tornado of violence and murder that fed on outrage and national pain in order to reshape the world, clumsily and contradictorily. There’s no sane way to ease the Iraq War into sense or respectability, and Draper doesn’t try. But the quiet, balanced gravity he brings to the whole subject does indeed, miraculously, serve to lower the temperature on the subject a bit.

At the center of the story is George W. Bush, and his portrait in these pages is the most likely barometer of how close that balanced gravity ever comes to the thin-gruel whitewashing that is the heart of ‘time heals all wounds.” Draper comments that he hopes the portrait of Bush in this book will be recognizable as fair, but his added implication, that Bush himself won’t like that portrait, is probably only partly true. Granted, Draper makes observations about Bush like “the information he received was not always as important as how he received it, through the narrow-mesh filters of his human experience,” but readers also get a few too many scenes like this: 

This sweeping notion of Saddam, as a despiser not only of the Bushes and Israelis but of freedom itself, had crystallized in him at some point in 2002. The president was not yet espousing the removal of Saddam as a critical first step in the democratization of the Middle East. But Bush was nonetheless affronted by Saddam’s swaggering tyranny - and, perhaps as much, by the suggestion that some totalitarianism was the best Iraqis could hope for. “He would really bristle at that,” a White House aide would recall. “He’d say, ‘That’s bullshit. Everybody deserves freedom.’”

Who wouldn’t take some occasional rough handling in a book if the same book has anonymous aides putting Clint Eastwood lines in their mouth? Readers who remember the Bush administration might wonder if the line ended with the first two words, and those same readers will doubtless have their issues with some of the other familiar characters in the story. Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, the aforementioned Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney … all are rendered here with considerably more three-dimensionality than they’ve typically been in previous accounts (James Mann’s The Rise of the Vulcans being a possible and complicated exception). 

Sometimes Draper’s gratitude toward his various sources and interview subjects can get the better of him, as when he refers to General Colin Powell as “a man who had become not just a leader but a great one.” But either way, it was Powell who tried to alter the course of Bush’s thinking, tried to dissuade him from his building determination to topple Saddam Hussein from power. It was Powell who reportedly told Bush “if you break it, you own it,” and it was Powell who tried to convince him to accept “a changed regime as a substitute for a regime change.” 

“It was arguably the most important message that George W. Bush would hear from any of his subordinates in his entire presidency,” Draper writes. “But it changed nothing.”

To Start a War is an even-handed historical assessment of a chapter in US history that even now resists even-handed treatment. It’s an important book, and important contribution to the understanding of that chapter, and the fact that it’s unlikely to satisfy completely every passionate partisan news-watcher from a decade ago is probably it’s greatest strength.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.