In the months leading up to March 2003, fresh from its swift and heady victory in Afghanistan, the Bush administration mobilized the United States armed forces to overthrow the government of Iraq. Eight months after the president declared an end to major combat operations, Saddam Hussein was captured in a farmhouse in Al-Dawr. And yet neither peace nor democracy has taken hold in Iraq; instead the country has plunged into terrorist insurgency and guerrilla warfare, with no end in sight.What went wrong?

In The Secret History of the Iraq War, bestselling author Yossef Bodansky offers an astonishing new account of the war and its aftermath--a war that was doomed from the start, he argues, by the massive and systemic failures of the American intelligence community. Drawing back the curtain of politicized debate, Bodansky--a longtime expert and director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare--reveals that nearly every aspect of America's conflict with Iraq has been misunderstood, in both the court of public opinion and the White House itself. Among his revelations:

• The most authoritative account of Saddam Hussein's support for Islamic terrorist organizations--including extensive new reporting on his active cooperation with al-Qaeda in Iraq long after the fall of Baghdad


• Extensive new information on Iraq's major chemical and biological weapons programs--including North Korea's role in building still-undetected secret storage facilities and Iraq's transfer of banned materials to Syria, Iran, and Libya


• The first account of Saddam's plan for Iraq, Syria, and Iran to join Yasser Arafat's Palestinian forces to attack Israel, throw the region into turmoil, and upend the American campaign


• The untold story of Russia's attempt to launch a coup against Saddam before the war--and how the CIA thwarted it by ensuring that Iraq was forewarned


• Dramatic details about Sa