In his new book Known and Unknown, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld provides yet more confirmation from the top level that President George W. Bush carried out a war against Iraq without ever deliberating on the consequences. The Bush administration made no considered decision for war and no effort to evaluate the costs and benefits of the invasion of Iraq which it carried out. Rumsfeld writes in his memoir, “while the president and I had many discussions about the war preparations, I do not recall his ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.” Rumsfeld’s statement directly confirms the National Security Archive’s analysis explicitly stated in a series of 2010 electronic briefing books from the Iraq Documentation Project. This archive series intended to reframe the origins of the Iraq war, included the September 2010 posting “The Iraq War, Part II: Was There Even a Decision?” by project co-director John Prados and guest analyst Christopher Ames. That briefing book presented declassified documents and quoted senior U.S. and British officials whose experiences were precisely the same as Rumsfeld’s. (more…)
