Buy the Book

“For anyone seriously interested in the decisions prior to and during the Iraq War, War and Decision is a must-read book. It is the first from within the Department of Defense, and Feith provides careful documentation rather than just freewheeling opinions. He explodes many of the journalistic and political myths that have become widely accepted. He provides a spirited defense of the President’s decisions, though the subsequent discussion makes clear the failures in execution. His judgments are thoughtful—and, for a major player in the process, he is quite objective regarding what went wrong. War and Decision will be a treasure trove for the historians—when the current passions have finally cooled.”

“The fullest and most thoughtful statement of the Pentagon thinking prior to and in the first stages of the Iraq war. Even those, as I, who take issue with some of its conclusions will gain a better perspective from reading this book.”

         — Robert L. Gallucci 
         Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
         Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, Clinton Administration

 

Recent Reviews of War and Decision

 

“The best account to date of how the administration debated, decided, organized and executed its military responses to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of what makes War and Decision so compelling is that it is, in effect, a revisionist history. Much to Mr. Feith’s credit, however, his book is no apologia, even for those he obviously admires. . . . Indispensable.”
       —Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal

“By far the most balanced, detailed, and lucid account of this story that’s come out yet. . . . Feith makes the first intellectually serious attempt to explain how the government tried to answer that question [of settling post-9/11 defense strategy] in the years after 9/11.”
        — “The Corner,” National Review Online

“It has just become considerably easier to understand the history of the decision to make Iraq a central front in the larger War for the Free World and to dissect what was and was not done right. Today marks the publication of an extraordinary new book on the subject. . . . I was unprepared for the thoroughness of the documentation, the sweeping nature of the narrative and the highly readable prose. It is the first attempt by a serious student of history to lay out the myriad, challenging choices confronting a president. . . . Splendid.”
       —Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Washington Times

“As Americans turned on the Iraq war, anti-war forces tried to portray the war as not only a mistake, but the result of a neoconservative coup. . . . In his new memoir, War and Decision, Mr. Feith does an admirable job in dispelling this hokum.”   
          —Eli Lake, New York Sun

“No one has been more vilified than Douglas Feith . . . and one would have expected, as in the case of all the other Iraq exposés, that he would use the memoir genre to get even. Instead, [in War and Decision] he is self-critical, even admits to occasional hubris, but, more importantly, also chronicles the contortions and reinventions of so many post-2003/4 critics of the war. . . . There are also good criticisms of the administration’s incompetence in communicating to the public what we were doing in Iraq—and indeed what the war on terror was about and what it was for.”
       —Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

"extraordinarily frank and persuasive. . . . This book provides our first in-depth look at the inside of the Bush administration's national
security top leadership from one who was there."
       —Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report