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Some of Drapers most revealing passages focus on the intense pressure that Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, as well as the Defense Department official Douglas J. Feith, exerted on the intelligence agencies to buttress and even concoct the case that Saddam had intimate ties with Al Qaeda and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Draper presents the former C.I.A. director George Tenet in a particularly unflattering light. After being shunted aside during the Clinton presidency, Tenet was desperate to show Bush that he was an important and loyal soldier in the new war against terrorism. Here we had this precious access, one senior analyst told Draper, and he didnt want to blow it. Tenet and his aides, Draper writes, feared the prospect of President Bush being spoon-fed a bouillabaisse of truths, unverified stories presented as truths and likely falsehoods. On the other hand, the agency stood to lose its role in helping separate fact from fiction if it appeared to be close-minded.

But Tenet ended up displaying canine fealty to Bush. In October 2002, when asked by the Senate intelligence chairman Bob Graham about whether any links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden really existed, Draper writes, Tenet issued a reply that Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz and Feith could only have dreamed of. He declared, among other things, that there was solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

For all the effort that Cheney and others expended in trying to depict Iraq as a dire menace, how much did the evidence and details actually matter? The cold, hard truth is that they didnt. They were political Play-Doh, to be massaged and molded as Bushs camarilla saw fit. Draper highlights the famous slam dunk meeting in the Oval Office in December 2002, when Tenet assured Bush that the evidence for Colin Powells upcoming speech at the United Nations Security Council in support of an invasion was solid.

In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward described Bush as being beset by doubt about the case for war, and suggested that Tenets affirmation had been very important. Draper disagrees. The issue wasnt the evidence. It was the spin: Tenets words were important only because they helped remove any doubt as to whether the C.I.A. could mount a solid case. Bushs thinking was as clear as it was simplistic. Saddam was a monster. It would be a bad idea to leave him in power. According to Draper, Bushs increasingly bellicose rhetoric reflected a wartime president who was no longer tethered to anything other than his own convictions.

In his 2005 Inaugural Address, Bush tried to turn neoconservative ideology into official doctrine: It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. It wasnt until the shellacking that the Republicans endured in the 2006 midterm elections that Bush began to abandon his fantasies about spreading peace, love and understanding across the Middle East. He fired Rumsfeld and shunted Cheney to the side.

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Why the United States Invaded Iraq - The New York Times