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I think the most recent that I read, Douglas Feith's "War and Decision," is the most informative. And I think it's the most credible for one reason - that it's the best documented.

Victor David Hanson interview

The Moderate Voice

If you want to read a serious book about the origins and consequences of the intervention in Iraq in 2003, you owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy of Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism <http://www.amazon.com/War-Decision-Inside-Pentagon-Terrorism/dp/0060899735/> . As undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was one of those most intimately involved in the argument about whether to and, if so, how to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book contains notes made in real time at the National Security Council, a trove of declassified documentation, and a thoroughly well-organized catalog of sources and papers and memos. Feith has also done us the service of establishing a Web site <https://waranddecision.com/> where you can go and follow up all his sources and check them for yourself against his analysis and explanation. There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan. As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review. An article on his book, written by the excellent James Risen for the news pages of the New York Times, has not run. This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan.

Feith was and is very much identified with the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, and he certainly did not believe that Saddam Hussein was ever containable in a sanctions "box." But he is capable of separating his views from his narrative, and this absorbing account of the interdepartmental and ideological quarrels within the Bush administration, on the Afghanistan and Guantanamo fronts as well as about Iraq, will make it difficult if not impossible for people to go on claiming that, for instance:

• There was no rational reason to suspect a continuing Iraqi WMD threat. Feith's citations from the Duelfer Report <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duelfer_Report#Duelfer_Report>  alone are stunning in their implications.
• That alternatives to war were never discussed and that the administration was out to "get" Saddam Hussein from the start.
• That the advocates of regime change hoped and indeed planned to anoint Ahmad Chalabi as a figurehead leader in Baghdad.
• That there was no consideration given to postwar planning.

It's also of considerable interest to learn that the main argument for adhering to the Geneva Conventions was made within the Pentagon and that the man who expressed the most prewar misgivings concerning Iraq was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Feith doesn't deny that he has biases of his own. One of these concerns the widely circulated charge that his own Office of Special Plans was engaged in cherry-picking and stovepiping intelligence. Another is the criticism, made by most of the neocon faction, of Paul Bremer and the occupation regime that he ran in Baghdad. In all instances, however, Feith writes in an unrancorous manner and is careful to supply the evidence and the testimony and, where possible, the actual documentation, from all sides.
Without explicitly saying so, Feith makes a huge contribution to the growing case for considering the Central Intelligence Agency to be well beyond salvage. Its role as a highly politicized and bewilderingly incompetent body, disastrous enough in having left us under open skies before Sept. 11, 2001, became something more like catastrophic with the gross mishandling of Iraq. For these revelations alone, this book is well worth the acquisition. (I might add that, unlike McClellan, Feith is contributing all his earnings and royalties to charities that care for our men and women in uniform.)
I don't know Feith, but I can pay him two further compliments: When you read him on a detail with which you yourself are familiar, he is factually reliable (and it's not often that one can say that, believe me). And his prose style is easy, nonbureaucratic, dry, and sometimes amusing. If a book that was truly informative was called a "tell-all" by our media, then War and Decision would qualify. As it is, we seem to reserve that term for the work of bigmouths who have little, if anything, to impart.

Christopher Hitchens

Slate

Nothing, literally nothing you know about the way that the Bush
Administration planned, decided, and executed the United States' strategy
for fighting and ultimately winning the war can stand up to the scrutiny
imposed by this consequential book. In twenty years, when historians start
to write a dispassionate history of the Bush Administration and its actions,
they would do well to start with Feith's careful, detailed, and surprising
account of the issues, decisions, mistakes, and triumphs that America
experienced in the early stages of its war against fundamentalist Islamic
extremists.

Mark Impomeni

RedState.com

Unlike most of the "Washington insider" books I have seen over the
years, this is a very carefully written and serious historical work, and
will be required reading for someone who wants a better understanding of why
and how we went to war in Iraq. And, especially for the Iraq war critics,
the book allows one to put strong opinions aside for a moment and learn
about the decision process and how it ended up where it did. It's all here -
and, whether one agrees with it or not, it's fascinating story and very well
told.

Daniel Gallington

The Washington Times

The great failure was not the politicization of intelligence, but the
absence of it, Mr. Feith makes clear. The CIA had little information on Iraq
and concealed its lack of sources from policymakers.

The CIA's most publicized failure was its insistence that Saddam Hussein had
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But the CIA also predicted there
would be mass defections from the Iraqi army when the U.S. invaded (there
weren't); that the army would remain intact at war's end (it didn't), and
that Iraqis would not accept political leadership from exiles (they did).
The CIA also had no clue Saddam had laid plans for an insurgency.

Jack Kelly

Real Clear Politics

Paul Mirengoff

Power Line blog

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