Inside the Iraq War

The following partial quote from a book review appears on the Claremont Institute website. The review is long but definitely worth the time if you want a better perspective on the Iraq war.  The entire review can be read here

 

 

Inside the Iraq War

A review of War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, by Douglas J. Feith

By Stanley Renshon Posted March 26, 2009

When the political venom and hyperbole fade, those interested in understanding the decisions and debates behind the critical first years of the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power will have to put Douglas Feith's book on their must-read list. He was, of course, the much maligned and caricatured deputy under secretary for defense under Donald Rumsfeld, and as such central to the Pentagon's efforts and the interagency debates that shaped the war.
Mischaracterizations of Feith's intelligence and book have been echoed by shallow pundits like Dana Milbank who clearly have no first-hand knowledge of the war-making process. In fact, Feith has decades of government foreign policy experience and is a thoughtful and reliable guide to the many debates that took place inside the administration. His own views on these matters are expressed clearly, as are the facts and judgments that led him to take those positions. Unlike so many books that have emerged about the war, Feith lays out the different positions in those debates and respects his readers enough to allow them to sort through the evidence and arrive at their own judgments. One wishes, in vain, that other writers had demonstrated the same even-handedness in providing context and counter-arguments.
So many of the other books to emerge about the Iraq War to date focus on the difficulties that American forces faced because of the brutal insurgency that took hold after Saddam was disposed. The tenor of those books is reflected in their titles: Fiasco, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. The none too subtle subtext of books like these is that the decisions made by the Bush Administration were both wrong and thus obviously avoidable. The explanations for these "facts" in the view of critics is that they are the obvious result of ignorance, arrogance, incompetence, and an increasingly irrational investment in rigid neoconservative ideology at the expense of selecting sound options which to the critics, writing in retrospect, were obvious."