Donald Henry Rumsfeld is a retired American politician. Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford, and again from January 2001 to December 2006 under George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the second-oldest person to have served as Secretary of Defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a three-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1963–69), director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–70), counsellor to the president (1969–73), the United States Permanent Representative to NATO (1973–74), and White House Chief of Staff (1974–75). Between his terms as Secretary of Defense, he served as the CEO and chairman of several companies.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion phase began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May 2003 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations", after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and currently holds the title of associate editor.
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine on national security matters and has also written for the London Review of Books since 2013.
Nicholas Donabet Kristof is an American journalist and political commentator. A winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, he is a regular CNN contributor and has written an op-ed column for The New York Times since November 2001. Kristof is a self-described progressive. According to The Washington Post, Kristof "rewrote opinion journalism" with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has described Kristof as an "honorary African" for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts.
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. was a United States Army general. While serving as the commander of United States Central Command, he led all coalition forces in the Gulf War.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which existed from September 2002 to June 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, as charged by then–United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior George W. Bush administration officials with raw intelligence pertaining to Iraq. A similar unit, called the Iranian Directorate, was created several years later, in 2006, to deal with intelligence on Iran.
Ricardo Sanchez is a former lieutenant general in the United States Army. His career was most notable for his service as commander of Multi-National Force – Iraq and V Corps.
The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, is a 2004 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind. The book was the first to provide critical insight into the events that led up to the Iraq War. The Price of Loyalty was met with both commercial and critical success, and was the first book by Suskind to be a #1 New York Times best-seller.
Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson IV is an American author, most recently of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy. He has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism.
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter, about U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Paul Vann and the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War.
Lawrence B.Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has publicly criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell's presentation to the UN, as well as other aspects of American policy in the Middle East.
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret "black site" prisons and other controversial features of the government's counter-terrorism campaign." The Washington Post won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the work of reporters Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille "exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials."
James Risen is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. The U.S. became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition; the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed conflict continue. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror following the September 11 attacks despite no connection of the latter to Iraq.
Thomas Edwin "Tom" Ricks is an American journalist and author who specializes in the military and national security issues. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting as part of teams from the Wall Street Journal (2000) and Washington Post (2002). He has reported on military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He previously wrote a blog for Foreign Policy and is a member of the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy think tank.
Douglas Abbott Macgregor is a U.S. Army Colonel (retired), government official, author, consultant, and television commentator.
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 is a 2009 book by journalist Thomas E. Ricks about the Iraq War. It covers the 2006–2008 period where his last book Fiasco left off. A primary focus is the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, along with the ascension to command of Gen. David Petraeus and the change in approach of Gen. Ray Odierno towards the use of counter-insurgency strategies. Ricks believes that the troop surge was successful in reducing violence in Iraq and "reviv[ing] American prospects in the war," but that it was a failure based on its initial goal of bringing about a political reconciliation in Iraq.
Mark Mazzetti is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist for the New York Times. He currently serves as a Washington Investigative Correspondent for the Times.
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq is a non-fiction book detailing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath by American journalist George Packer, otherwise best known for his writings in The New Yorker. He published the work through Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2005. Packer stated that the whole project became a bungled mess with American officials in the George W. Bush administration cherry-picking intelligence to support their positions, as well as being unable to respond to military issues such as insufficient troops, armor, and supplies.
