"He Brings Home the Fundamental Rashness and Recklessness of the American Response to the Sept. 11 Attack"

"A more deadly consequence of this heedlessness was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the false belief that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. An exchange from that time conveys the mind-set of the Bush administration. When Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, told Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary, that there was no intelligence linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, 'Wolfowitz tightened his lips,' Eichenwald writes. '"We’ll find it," he said with certainty in his voice. "It’s got to be there."' The run-up to the Iraq war also elicits one of the most pungent lines in the book. After Bush told Jacques Chirac that biblical prophecies were being fulfilled and specifically that 'Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,' the French president decided, in Eichenwald’s words, that 'France was not going to fight a war based on an American president’s interpretation of the Bible.'"

In The New York Times, Thomas E. Ricks reviews Kurt Eichenwald's 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars.