Confronting Saddam Hussein offers a welcome antidote to flip assessments of the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Mel Leffler's provocative new account shows that the invasion was not a result of cartoonish bumbling or single-minded warmongering, but rather careful debate poisoned by a disastrous mix of fear and hubris.
Melvyn P. Leffler is Emeritus Professor of American History at The University of Virginia. He is the author of several books on the Cold War and on US relations with Europe, including For the Soul of Mankind (2007), which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and A Preponderance of Power (1993), which won the Bancroft, Hoover, and Ferrell Prizes. In 2010, he and Odd Arne Westad co-edited the
three volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. Along with Jeff Legro and Will Hitchcock, he is co-editor of Shaper Nations: Strategies for a Changing World (2016). Most recently, he published Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015 (2017). He has served as president of the Society for the
History of American Foreign Relations, Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University, and Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at The University of Virginia.