Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence & America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy - Political History Book for Students & Policy Makers

Though the events of the Iraq War are still to close to be treated with true historical dispassion, Mazarr does his best. He delivers a readable, thoroughly documented account of the underlying factors that impelled the Bush administration to make the decisions that led to war as well as some of the critical decisions of the early occupation period. He convincingly describes the constraints placed upon the administration’s thinking by the post-9/11 change in the calculus of risk (as described in Suskind’s “One Percent Doctrine”) and the long-standing American tradition of conceiving its role in the world in messianic terms. To this latter constraint George W. Bush’s unique psychology and worldview proved especially susceptible.Mazarr avoids demonizing the decision-makers of the Bush administration, while also delivering an unsparing look at their failures and foibles. In this he differs from many of the authors who have covered this ground previously, notably Dr. Andrew Bacevich, whose hatchet job of a review in the NYT is better viewed as an artifact of our times than any kind of even-handed evaluation of Mazarr’s work. For the Bacevich school, every exercise of American power at least since 1945 is ipso facto a crime, and the Iraq War naturally is no exception. Readers should take such opinions with a spoonful of salt, and form their own conclusions.While he does not demonize nor criminalize, and generally presumes the good faith of the administration’s principals within the boundaries of the flawed assumptions that constrained their thinking, Mazarr does not flinch from a judgment on accountability. I found his enunciation of the doctrine of “policy negligence” a clear, convincing framework for assessing the performance and potential culpability of strategic decision-makers in terms of the quality of the interagency processes they oversee. It is one we should keep in mind, perhaps, as we consider governmental decisions of the more recent past, and those ongoing today.Ultimately Mazarr assesses the result of the Bush administration’s constrained decision-making as a tragedy rather than a crime. On balance I found myself accepting this judgment, though on the specific issues of using international WMD inspections to maneuver Iraq into war, and manipulating available intelligence to make the public case for war, I still have difficulty in ascribing these to anything other than dishonorable if not criminal intent. Still and all, until many more years have passed and all the archives are open to historians of the future, this work is likely to stand as one of the most complete and balanced assessments available of this black chapter in U.S. history.Should it matter to anyone, I am a retired Marine infantry officer with 27 years active service including combat tours in Iraq in 2003 and 2006.