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How America Lost Iraq
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Book Synopsis How America Lost Iraq by : Aaron Glantz
Download or read book How America Lost Iraq written by Aaron Glantz and published by Tarcher. This book was released on 2006 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reporter in Iraq shows how the U.S. squandered its early victories and goodwill among the Iraqi public and allowed the newly freed society to descend into violence and chaos. Here is a brutally honest account of a reporter who discovered how popular the U.S. presence was in Iraq-and who watched this change as the Bush administration mishandled the war, leaving us with the intractable conflict we face today.
Download or read book Why We Lost written by Daniel P. Bolger and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A high-ranking general's gripping insider account of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how it all went wrong. Over a thirty-five-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both theaters of the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in meetings with top-level military and civilian players, where strategy was made and managed. At the same time, he regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat actions, unusual for a general. Now, as a witness to all levels of military command, Bolger offers a unique assessment of these wars, from 9/11 to the final withdrawal from the region. Writing with hard-won experience and unflinching honesty, Bolger makes the firm case that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, we lost -- but we didn't have to. Intelligence was garbled. Key decision makers were blinded by spreadsheets or theories. And, at the root of our failure, we never really understood our enemy. Why We Lost is a timely, forceful, and compulsively readable account of these wars from a fresh and authoritative perspective.
Download or read book To Start a War written by Robert Draper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Essential . . . one for the ages . . . a must read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post “Authoritative . . . The most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.” —LA Times One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 To Start a War paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. Robert Draper’s fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective scurrying for evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false—evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
Book Synopsis I Lost My Love in Baghdad by : Michael Hastings
Download or read book I Lost My Love in Baghdad written by Michael Hastings and published by Melbourne Univ. Publishing. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The much-anticipated book by first time author Michael Hastings which was sold by the Wylie agency in a very high-profile deal to Scribner in the USA. MUP is proud to have acquired the ANZ rights to I Lost My Love in Baghdad. In January 2007, Andi Parhamovich was killed in Baghdad. She was a 28-year-old American aid worker whose car had been ambushed in one of Baghdad's worst neighbourhoods. Andi was also engaged to the author, Newsweek's Iraqi correspondent Michael Hastings. Hastings charts the ups and downs of their relationship, a modern love story played out against the ultra-violent backdrop of Iraq. From the day they met in New York to her tragic killing, it is a story that tries to answer questions about our involvement in the war in Iraq. This is Michael Hastings' scathing, savage picture of a hopeless war gone horribly wrong.
Book Synopsis A Poisonous Affair by : Joost R. Hiltermann
Download or read book A Poisonous Affair written by Joost R. Hiltermann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-18 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, thousands were killed in a chemical attack in a remote town in Iraqi Kurdistan. In the aftermath of the horror, confusion reigned over who had carried it out, each side accusing the other in the ongoing bloodbath of the Iran-Iraq war. As the fog lifted, the responsibility of Saddam Hussein's regime was revealed, and with it the tacit support of Iraq's western allies. This book, by a veteran observer of human rights in the Middle East, tells the story of the gassing of Halabja. It shows how Iraq was able to develop ever-more sophisticated chemical weapons and target Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villagers as America looked the other way. Today, as Iraq disintegrates and the Middle East sinks further into turmoil, these policies are coming back to haunt America and the West.
Download or read book What We Owe Iraq written by Noah Feldman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we owe Iraq? America is up to its neck in nation building--but the public debate, focused on getting the troops home, devotes little attention to why we are building a new Iraqi nation, what success would look like, or what principles should guide us. What We Owe Iraq sets out to shift the terms of the debate, acknowledging that we are nation building to protect ourselves while demanding that we put the interests of the people being governed--whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or elsewhere--ahead of our own when we exercise power over them. Noah Feldman argues that to prevent nation building from turning into a paternalistic, colonialist charade, we urgently need a new, humbler approach. Nation builders should focus on providing security, without arrogantly claiming any special expertise in how successful nation-states should be made. Drawing on his personal experiences in Iraq as a constitutional adviser, Feldman offers enduring insights into the power dynamics between the American occupiers and the Iraqis, and tackles issues such as Iraqi elections, the prospect of successful democratization, and the way home. Elections do not end the occupier's responsibility. Unless asked to leave, we must resist the temptation of a military pullout before a legitimately elected government can maintain order and govern effectively. But elections that create a legitimate democracy are also the only way a nation builder can put itself out of business and--eventually--send its troops home. Feldman's new afterword brings the Iraq story up-to-date since the book's original publication in 2004, and asks whether the United States has acted ethically in pushing the political process in Iraq while failing to control the security situation; it also revisits the question of when, and how, to withdraw.
Book Synopsis The American War in Afghanistan by : Carter Malkasian
Download or read book The American War in Afghanistan written by Carter Malkasian and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book Winner of 2022 Lionel Gelber Prize The first authoritative history of American's longest war by one of the world's leading scholar-practitioners. The American war in Afghanistan, which began in 2001, is now the longest armed conflict in the nation's history. It is currently winding down, and American troops are likely to leave soon but only after a stay of nearly two decades. In The American War in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian provides the first comprehensive history of the entire conflict. Malkasian is both a leading academic authority on the subject and an experienced practitioner, having spent nearly two years working in the Afghan countryside and going on to serve as the senior advisor to General Joseph Dunford, the US military commander in Afghanistan and later the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Drawing from a deep well of local knowledge, understanding of Pashto, and review of primary source documents, Malkasian moves through the war's multiple phases: the 2001 invasion and after; the light American footprint during the 2003 Iraq invasion; the resurgence of the Taliban in 2006, the Obama-era surge, and the various resets in strategy and force allocations that occurred from 2011 onward, culminating in the 2018-2020 peace talks. Malkasian lived through much of it, and draws from his own experiences to provide a unique vantage point on the war. Today, the Taliban is the most powerful faction, and sees victory as probable. The ultimate outcome after America leaves is inherently unpredictable given the multitude of actors there, but one thing is sure: the war did not go as America had hoped. Although the al-Qa'eda leader Osama bin Laden was killed and no major attack on the American homeland was carried out after 2001, the United States was unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities, which could not survive without US military backing. The American War in Afghanistan explains why the war had such a disappointing outcome. Wise and all-encompassing, The American War in Afghanistan provides a truly vivid portrait of the conflict in all of its phases that will remain the authoritative account for years to come.
Book Synopsis How America Lost Its Mind by : Thomas E. Patterson
Download or read book How America Lost Its Mind written by Thomas E. Patterson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans are losing touch with reality. On virtually every issue, from climate change to immigration, tens of millions of Americans have opinions and beliefs wildly at odds with fact, rendering them unable to think sensibly about politics. In How America Lost Its Mind, Thomas E. Patterson explains the rise of a world of “alternative facts” and the slow-motion cultural and political calamity unfolding around us. We don’t have to search far for the forces that are misleading us and tearing us apart: politicians for whom division is a strategy; talk show hosts who have made an industry of outrage; news outlets that wield conflict as a marketing tool; and partisan organizations and foreign agents who spew disinformation to advance a cause, make a buck, or simply amuse themselves. The consequences are severe. How America Lost Its Mind maps a political landscape convulsed with distrust, gridlock, brinksmanship, petty feuding, and deceptive messaging. As dire as this picture is, and as unlikely as immediate relief might be, Patterson sees a way forward and underscores its urgency. A call to action, his book encourages us to wrest institutional power from ideologues and disruptors and entrust it to sensible citizens and leaders, to restore our commitment to mutual tolerance and restraint, to cleanse the Internet of fake news and disinformation, and to demand a steady supply of trustworthy and relevant information from our news sources. As philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote decades ago, the rise of demagogues is abetted by “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” In How America Lost Its Mind, Thomas E. Patterson makes a passionate case for fully and fiercely engaging on the side of truth and mutual respect in our present arms race between fact and fake, unity and division, civility and incivility.
Book Synopsis The Afghanistan Papers by : Craig Whitlock
Download or read book The Afghanistan Papers written by Craig Whitlock and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Best Book of 2021 The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock. Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives. Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory. Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public’s understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains “fast-paced and vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government’s strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground. Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn’t know the name of his Afghanistan war commander—and didn’t want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.” His successor, Robert Gates, said: “We didn’t know jack shit about al-Qaeda.” The Afghanistan Papers is a “searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials” (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.
Download or read book Fiasco written by Thomas E. Ricks and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.
Book Synopsis America's Modern Wars by : Christopher A. Lawrence
Download or read book America's Modern Wars written by Christopher A. Lawrence and published by Casemate. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A well researched and well analyzed study of the nature of insurgencies and guerilla warfare” (Military Review). The fighting skills and valor of the US military and its allies haven’t diminished over the past half-century—yet our wars have become more protracted and decisive results more elusive. With only two exceptions—Panama and the Gulf War under the first President Bush—our campaigns have taken on the character of endless slogs without positive results. This fascinating book takes a ground-up look at the problem to assess how our strategic objectives have become divorced from our true capability or imperatives. The book presents a unique examination of the nature of insurgencies and the three major guerrilla wars the United States has fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. It is both a theoretical work and one that applies the hard experience of the past five decades to address the issues of today. As such, it also provides a timely and meaningful discussion of America’s current geopolitical position. It starts with the previously close-held casualty estimate for Iraq that The Dupuy Institute compiled in 2004 for the US Department of Defense. Going from the practical to the theoretical, it then discusses a construct for understanding insurgencies and the contexts in which they can be fought. It applies these principles to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam, assessing where the projection of US power can enhance our position and where it merely weakens it. It presents an extensive analysis of insurgencies based upon a unique database of eighty-three post-WWII cases. The book explores what is important to combat and what is not important to resist in insurgencies. It builds a body of knowledge, based upon a half-century’s worth of real-world data, with analysis, not opinion. In these pages, Christopher A. Lawrence, the President of The Dupuy Institute, provides an invaluable guide to how the US can best project its vital power while avoiding the missteps of the recent past. “Provides a unique quantitative historical analysis . . . Logically estimating the outcomes of future military operations, as the author writes, is what US citizens should expect and demand from their leaders who take this country to war.” —Military Review
Download or read book Losing Iraq written by David L. Phillips and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to conventional wisdom, Iraq has suffered because the Bush administration had no plan for reconstruction. That's not the case; the State Department's Future of Iraq group planned out the situation carefully and extensively, and Middle East expert David Phillips was part of this group. White House ideologues and imprudent Pentagon officials decided simply to ignore those plans. The administration only listened to what it wanted to hear. Losing Iraq doesn't't just criticize the policies of unilateralism, preemption, and possible deception that launched the war; it documents the process of returning sovereignty to an occupied Iraq. Unique, as well, are Phillips's personal accounts of dissension within the administration. The problems encountered in Iraq are troubling not only in themselves but also because they bode ill for other nation-building efforts in which the U.S. may become mired through this administration's doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war. Losing Iraq looks into the future of America's foreign policy with a clear-eyed critique of the problems that loom ahead.
Book Synopsis Blind Into Baghdad by : James Fallows
Download or read book Blind Into Baghdad written by James Fallows and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-02-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the autumn of 2002, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows wrote an article predicting many of the problems America would face if it invaded Iraq. After events confirmed many of his predictions, Fallows went on to write some of the most acclaimed, award-winning journalism on the planning and execution of the war, much of which has been assigned as required reading within the U.S. military. In Blind Into Baghdad, Fallows takes us from the planning of the war through the struggles of reconstruction. With unparalleled access and incisive analysis, he shows us how many of the difficulties were anticipated by experts whom the administration ignored. Fallows examines how the war in Iraq undercut the larger ”war on terror” and why Iraq still had no army two years after the invasion. In a sobering conclusion, he interviews soldiers, spies, and diplomats to imagine how a war in Iran might play out. This is an important and essential book to understand where and how the war went wrong, and what it means for America.
Download or read book America and Iraq written by David Ryan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume provides an overview on US involvement in Iraq from the 1958 Iraqi coup to the present-day, offering a deeper context to the current conflict. Using a range of innovative methods to interrogate US foreign policy, ideology and culture, the book provides a broad set of reflections on past, present and future implications of US-Iraqi relations, and especially the strategic implications for US policy-making. In doing so, it examines several key aspects of relationship such as: the 1958 Iraqi Revolution; the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War; the impact of the Nixon Doctrine on the regional balance of power; US attempts at rapprochement during the 1980s; the 1990-91 Gulf War; and, finally, sanctions and inspections. Analysis of the contemporary Iraq crisis sets US plans against the ‘reality’ they faced in the country, and explores both attempts to bring security to Iraq, and the implications of failure.
Download or read book Return to Greatness written by Alan Wolfe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has America, in its quest for goodness, sacrificed its sense of greatness? In this sharp-witted, historically informed book, veteran political observer Alan Wolfe argues that most Americans show greater concern with saving the country's soul than with making the nation great. Wolfe castigates both conservatives and liberals for opting for small-mindedness over greatness. Liberals, who at their best insisted on policies of national solidarity, have convinced themselves that small is beautiful, prefer multiculturalism to one nation, and are mistrustful of executive political power. Conservatives, who once embraced strong, active central government and an ideal of national citizenship, now support huge tax cuts that undermine America's future ability to undertake any ambitious, long-term project at home or abroad. No great society, in Wolfe's view, has ever been built on the cheap. Wolfe notes that neither the conservatives' call for small-scale faith-based initiatives nor the recent embrace on the left of a grassroots "civil society" can provide health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans or ensure national security in an age of terrorism. To find better solutions, Wolfe looks back at specific moments in our national experience, when, in the face of sharp resistance, aspirations for the idea of national greatness shaped American history. He demonstrates how a bold and ambitious political agenda, championed at various times by Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts, steered the country toward periods of national strength and unity. Steeped in a colorful, panoramic reading of history, Return to Greatness offers a fresh take on American national identity and purpose. A call to action for a renewed embrace of the ideal of an activist federal government and bold policy agendas, it is sure to become a centerpiece of national debate.
Book Synopsis Anatomy of Failure by : Harlan Ullman
Download or read book Anatomy of Failure written by Harlan Ullman and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, since the end of World War II, has the United States either lost every war it started or failed in every military intervention it prosecuted? Harlan Ullman's new book answers this most disturbing question, a question Americans would never think of even asking because this record of failure has been largely hidden in plain sight or forgotten with the passage of time. The most straightforward answer is that presidents and administrations have consistently failed to use sound strategic thinking and lacked sufficient knowledge or understanding of the circumstances prior to deciding whether or not to employ force. Making this case is an in-depth analysis of the records of presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama and Donald Trump in using force or starting wars. His recommended solutions begin with a "brains-based" approach to sound strategic thinking to address one of the major causes of failure ----the inexperience of too many of the nation's commanders-in-chief. Ullman reinforces his argument through the use of autobiographical vignettes that provide a human dimension and insight into the reasons for failure, in some cases making public previously unknown history. The clarion call of Anatomy of Failure is that both a sound strategic framework and sufficient knowledge and understanding of the circumstance that may lead to using force are vital. Without them, failure is virtually guaranteed.
Book Synopsis The Assassins' Gate by : George Packer
Download or read book The Assassins' Gate written by George Packer and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, TheSan Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine. Winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book on International Affairs Winner of the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration's war policy and led America to the Assassins' Gate—the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad. The Assassins' Gate also describes the place of the war in American life: the ideological battles in Washington that led to chaos in Iraq, the ordeal of a fallen soldier's family, and the political culture of a country too bitterly polarized to realize such a vast and morally complex undertaking. George Packer's best-selling first-person narrative combines the scope of an epic history with the depth and intimacy of a novel, creating a masterful account of America's most controversial foreign venture since Vietnam.
