Even after more than fifteen years it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. Draper paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised, by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and participants who gamed the process relentlessly. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. The result is a definitive account of a collective process, arriving at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth-- and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing. -- adapted from jacket