"How Bush got into this quagmire"

Dedicated hardliners and an Iraqi conman finally got what they wanted in Iraq, writes Robert Manne.

Even former enthusiasts now generally acknowledge that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is the greatest disaster in the recent history of US foreign policy. It took almost a decade for the folly of Vietnam to become clear. In Iraq it has taken only a little over a year. Nothing is more important than to try to understand how this catastrophe occurred.

Recently two outstanding and impartial investigations into the origins of the Iraq war have been published - Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans. Woodward chronicles the road to invasion following September 11. Mann, more ambitiously, analyses the political and intellectual revolution in right-wing American foreign policy thought and practice - loosely, the rise of neo-conservatism - since the end of the Vietnam War. In combination, Woodward and Mann can provide a far more detailed and nuanced understanding of the Iraq debacle than was previously the case. www.theage.com.au