Iraq: The War of the Imagination

By Mark Danner

State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III

by Bob Woodward

Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., $30.00

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

by Ron Suskind

Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $27.00

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

by James Risen

Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00

Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.
—George F. Kennan,September 26, 2002^[1]

I ask you, sir, what is the American army doing inside Iraq?... Saddam's story has been finished for close to three years.
—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran to Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, August 13, 2006-

In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr (The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan. Not the grand old man of American diplomacy, the ninety-eight-year-old Father of Containment who, listening to the war drums beat from a Washington nursing home in the fall of 2002, had uttered the prophetic words above. I was thinking of an earlier Kennan, the brilliant and ambitious young diplomat who during the late 1920s and 1930s had gazed out on the crumbling European order from Tallinn and Berlin and Prague and read the signs of the coming world conflict.