Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq

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Based on interviews with 75 key participants and more than three and a half hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush, Plan of Attack is part presidential history charting the decisions made during 16 critical months; part military history revealing precise details and the evolution of the Top Secret war planning under the restricted codeword Polo Step; and part a harrowing spy story as the CIA dispatches a covert paramilitary team into northern Iraq six months before the start of the war. This team recruited 87 Iraqi spies designated with the cryptonym DB/ROCKSTARS, one of whom turned over the personnel files of all 6,000 men in Saddam Hussein's personal security organization.

What emerges are astonishingly intimate portraits: President Bush in war cabinet meetings in the White House Situation Room and the Oval Office, and in private conversation; Dick Cheney, the focused and driven vice president; Colin Powell, the conflicted and cautious secretary of state; Donald Rumsfeld, the controlling war technocrat; George Tenet, the activist CIA director; Tommy Franks, the profane and demanding general; Condoleezza Rice, the ever-present referee and national security adviser; Karl Rove, the hands-on political strategist; other key members of the White House staff and congressional leadership; and foreign leaders ranging from British Prime Minister Blair to Russian President Putin.

Plan of Attack provides new details on the intelligence assessments of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the planning for the war's aftermath.

What Customers Say About Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq:

It reveals plenty of new material. This book was very informative without throwing in personal bias but just stating the facts.

Great book defining the President's decision to go to war, and the inept stooges running our country.

W. What, me worry.At the least, some of the sinister side of Dick Cheney shows through. If Secretary of State Colin Powell did in fact have such misgivings about the war, however, as stated in the book (and yet stayed on out of political loyalty and sent thousands to their deaths), I find it even harder to believe that G. Well, this is a classic example of why histories should not be written within a few short months of the event. Bush was the innocent bystander that Woodward paints him to be. His questions of the president, during and after, are softballs that are infuriating to read as the Bush innocently claims he thought he was just getting the finest intelligence that ever was, and blaming everything on George Tenet for his alleged "Slam-Dunk" statement. Woodward fawns over President Bush, accepting without question that Bush had nothing to do with orchestrating the grand deception of the American public that led to war. Gosh, golly, I really believed ol' George, yuh know--in fact, that's all I needed.

We did not read this book. We returned this book because you sent it to us minus the first twenty or so pages.

At this moment, December of 2007, when we are learning that our own intelligence does not support the existence of a nuclear threat from Iran, we're also seeing the neocon establishment attack the messengers, and re-focus on Iran's intent rather than capability. The parallels between the developments that Woodward reports on in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and what we are seeing with respect to Iran, are eerie--the distortion and exaggeration of intelligence to justify the war, the simultaneous building up of forces in the region, and the willingness to shift justifications as needed, jump from the page. Unless Bush and those around him have experienced a real change of heart, the White House depicted by Woodward can be expected to redouble its efforts to bring about regime change in Iran, rather than admit any errors and change course.I strongly recommend giving _Plan of Attack_ a read or re-read right now, certainly for what it says about how and why we got into Iraq, but even more for what it may presage about Iran. I just reread _Plan of Attack_, and was struck by how much light it sheds on the currently unfolding drama swirling around Iran. To the extent that President Bush still appears to believe that it is his sacred duty to strike pre-emptively at evil wherever he finds it, then the current "coercive diplomacy" being aimed at Iran--the current exemplar of his "axis of evil"--seems likely to end in war, just as it did in Iraq.