Donald Henry Rumsfeld was an American politician, government official and businessman who served as Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under president Gerald Ford, and again from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He was both the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense. Additionally, Rumsfeld was a four-term U.S. Congressman from Illinois (1963–1969), director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1969–1970), counselor to the president (1969–1973), the U.S. Representative to NATO (1973–1974), and the White House Chief of Staff (1974–1975). Between his terms as secretary of defense, he served as the CEO and chairman of several companies.
Opposition to the Iraq War significantly occurred worldwide, both before and during the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq by a United States–led coalition, and throughout the subsequent occupation. Individuals and groups opposing the war include the governments of many nations which did not take part in the invasion, including both its land neighbors Canada and Mexico, its NATO allies in Europe such as France and Germany, as well as China and Indonesia in Asia, and significant sections of the populace in those that took part in the invasion. Opposition to the war was also widespread domestically.
The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., that focused on United States foreign policy. It was established as a non-profit educational organization in 1997, and founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership". The organization stated that "American leadership is good both for America and for the world", and sought to build support for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity".
Lawrence Ari Fleischer is an American media consultant and political aide who served as the 23rd White House Press Secretary, for President George W. Bush, from January 2001 to July 2003.
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, was released in June 2021.
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (ISBN 0-7432-6823-7) is a 2004 award-winning book by former U.S. chief counter-terrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, criticizing past and present presidential administrations for the way they handled the War on Terrorism. The book focused much of its criticism on President George W. Bush, charging that he failed to take sufficient action to protect the country in the elevated-threat period before the September 11 attacks and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Clarke feels greatly hampered the War on Terrorism. The book's title comes from the oath of office taken by all U.S. federal officials, in which they promise to defend the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
Plan of Attack is a 2004 book by the American author and investigative reporter Bob Woodward. It was promoted as "a behind-the-scenes account of how and why President [George W.] Bush decided to go to war against Iraq".
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Charlie Savage is an American author and newspaper reporter with The New York Times. In 2007, when employed by The Boston Globe, he was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. He writes about national security legal policy, including presidential power, surveillance, drone strikes, torture, secrecy, leak investigations, military commissions, war powers, and the U.S. war on terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence (1991), a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
Kenneth Lee Adelman is an American diplomat, political writer, policy analyst and William Shakespeare scholar. Adelman has been a member of the board of directors of the global data collection company RIWI Corp. since June 2016.
There are various rationales for the Iraq War, both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent hostilities. The George W. Bush administration began actively pressing for military intervention in Iraq in late 2001. The primary rationalization for the Iraq War was articulated by a joint resolution of the United States Congress known as the Iraq Resolution. The US claimed the intent was to "disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people".
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies is a 2004 book by journalist James Bamford that takes a highly critical view of the events around 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War.
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (ISBN 0-7432-7223-4) is a 2006 book by Bob Woodward that examines how the George W. Bush administration managed the Iraq War after the 2003 invasion. It follows Woodward's previous books on the Bush administration, Bush at War and Plan of Attack. Based on interviews with a number of people in the Bush administration, the book makes a number of allegations about the administration.
Abram Shulsky is a neoconservative scholar who has worked for the U.S. government, RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute. Shulsky served as Director of the Office of Special Plans, a unit whose function has been compared to the 1970s Team B exercise. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shulsky approved OSP memos with talking points about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Shulsky is critical of the traditional intelligence analysis, which is based upon the social-scientific method, and of independent intelligence agencies. Shulsky favors a military intelligence model which can be used to support policy as, in Shulsky's words, "truth is not the goal" of intelligence operations, but "victory". Shulsky signed a letter to the Clinton White House on Iraq.
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) is a book by Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks. Fiasco deals with the history of the Iraq War from the planning phase to combat operations in 2006 and argues that the war was badly planned and executed. Ricks based the book in part on interviews with military personnel involved in the planning and execution of the war. In 2009, Ricks published a sequel The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008. Fiasco was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
No End in Sight is a 2007 American documentary film about the American occupation of Iraq. The directorial debut of Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson, it premiered on January 22, 2007, at the Sundance Film Festival and opened in its first two theaters in the United States on July 27, 2007. By December of that year, it had a theatrical gross of $1.4 million. The film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 80th Academy Awards.
Karen DeYoung is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, and is the associate editor for The Washington Post.
The War Within: A Secret White House History (2006–2008) is a non-fiction book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that was released by publisher Simon & Schuster on September 8, 2008. It is the fifteenth book written by Woodward, the fourth in a series of books about President George W. Bush and his administration's foreign policy including Bush at War, Plan of Attack, and State of Denial. The book discusses the debate within the administration about the controversial Iraq "surge" strategy implemented in 2007. Simon & Schuster editor Alice Mayhew said in an official statement that "There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers. This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes."
Known and Unknown: A Memoir is an autobiographical book by Donald Rumsfeld published through Penguin Group USA in February 2011. It covers a variety of his experiences such as serving as a member of the United States House of Representatives in the late 60s, as a member of the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War, and as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense at the onset of the War on Terror.
