Michael J. Mazarr - Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy

Did the decision to invade Iraq arise from conspiracy or long-term plot, as some people suspect? No, says Michael Mazarrthe truth is actually much darker. In this novelistic plus analytic recreation of the road to war, Mazarr convincingly argues that the most costly strategic error in modern US history was the result of mistake, blunder, a toxic combination of personality traits among political and military leaders, plus intellectual and moral hubris. Leap of Faith puts the Iraq war in new light, and clarifies why and how such disasters might recur.

James Fallows, national correspondent at The Atlantic, and author of Blind Into Baghdad and other books

Leap of Faith should be mandatory reading for every US general and flag officer as well as civilian senior executives; all military officers, especially those at a US senior service college; and every graduate student at an American school of security or international studies. It is a disturbing account of negligence and myopia at the highest civilian and military levelsin how they decided to launch the 2003 Iraq invasion and in the exercise of their responsibilities for those who fought at their direction. Leap of Faith will become a classic; it is this generations Dereliction of Duty and Essence of Decision.

Lieutenant General James M. Dubik, PhD, US Army, retired; author, Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory; and former professor, Security Studies Program, Georgetown University

Deeply researched and written with penetrating intelligence, Leap of Faith is a remarkable new look at the run-up to the Iraq War. While never less than clear-eyed and fair-minded, this is ultimately a powerful and bracing indictment of a group of mostly smart, well-meaning people who talked themselves, and us, into a set of woeful miscalculations. Breathtaking in its insights, devastating in its conclusions, Mazarrs book will stand as the definitive analysis of what went wrong and how.

Jim Rasenberger, author of The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and Americas Doomed Invasion of Cubas Bay of Pigs

The Iraq War stands as one of the greatest US foreign policy blunders in history. Michael Mazarr has written the definitive account on how the decision to go to war came about. Leap of Faith contains valuable lessons for how future policy-makers can avoid disaster.

Ivo Daalder, president, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and author of The Empty Throne: Americas Abdication of Global Leadership

Mazarr has written an excellent antidote to the simplistic and wrong Iraq narrative that Bush lied, people died. He shows how US leaders tried to confront all potential threats after 9/11, and he describes the mistakes that led Iraq from the tragedy of Saddam to the tragedy of chaos. He writes wonderfully and shows very well the dilemmas facing successive generations of leaders of what is indeed the indispensable nation. Of course there have been serious errors alongside the vital, existential successes of the American Century. A world without the deep and fundamentally decent involvement of America will be far more dangerous and brutal.

William Shawcross, author of Allies: Why the West Had to Remove Saddam

Michael Mazarrs Leap of Faith is an incisive inquest into Americas most disastrous war since Vietnam. Writing with panache and precision, Mazarr illustrates that real ideological impulses drove the will to war in 2003. It was not a Freudian war to avenge or compete with a father, or a lunge for oil, or the product of a small cabal of ideologues who have left the scene. Rather, it was made possible by a strain of missionary zeal that lives on. Because warlike idealism lives on, the Iraq adventure was not just a problem of recent history, but is a crisis of the present. Mazarrs Leap of Faith is a seminal, sharp, and prophetic history. We have been warned.

Patrick Porter, chair in International Security and Strategy, University of Birmingham, and author of Blunder: Britains War in Iraq

Judging is our oldest faith.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE