Iraq
Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War
by Bob Drogin
BushCo's justification for the Iraq War was, of course, the imminent danger posed by Iraq's WMDs -- WMDs that, it's turned out, didn't exist. An award-winning LA Times reporter now weaves a cinematic narrative of a story he and his colleague Greg Miller first broke in 2004: about a "former taxi driver who told a few lies to get a visa -- and instead wound up as the crucial center of the Bush administration's case for war." Drogin's villains are favor-currying, turf-protecting German and American "intelligence" officials (and especially George Tenet) who further inflated the Iraqi asylum seeker's fabrications into precisely the "evidence" they knew U.S. officials were after. Many professionals doubted the veracity of the man code-named "Curveball," but because his stories provided what many ranking officials wanted to hear, those who questioned too much were browbeaten into silence and in some cases had their careers derailed.
Curveball ... published October 16, 2007 by Random House
The Sutras of Abu Ghraib:
Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq by Aidan Delgado
Despite his interest in and experiences with Buddhism, Delgado enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves -- as it turned out, literally minutes before the 9/11 attacks. He soon found himself in Iraq, where he evolved further toward pacifism, ultimately becoming a conscientious objector. Here he tells the stories of not only his army, Iraq and CO experiences, but also of his youth, in which he grew up in countries including Egypt (where he learned Arabic) and Thailand (where he was initially exposed to Buddhism). What I found most remarkable about this book was its familiarity. I enlisted and evolved into a conscientious objector over 30 years ago, and I was surprised at how little either the army or the CO experience seems to have changed; the author does an fine job of evoking the diverse personalities and mundane realities of army life. That grounds his credibility as he describes some appalling people and events that forced him to take stock of his own humanity.
The Sutras of Abu Ghraib ... published August 15, 2007 by Beacon
High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of
Two Englishwomen in War-torn Iraq by Lynne O'Donnell
For a clear picture of what day-to-day life has been like in recent years for ordinary Iraqis, it would be hard to improve on High Tea in Mosul. The author was one of the first Western journalists to enter Mosul following the American invasion. Making her way to a hospital, she was asked by an Iraqi doctor whether she'd like to meet his wife. To O'Donnell's surprise, the wife turned out to be an Englishwoman who'd lived with her Iraqi husband in Mosul for roughly 30 years. So, too, the wife's friend: another British woman who'd met her husband while he was a student in England in the 1970s. The ex-Brits were, therefore, in excellent positions to relate -- for an English-speaking audience -- the nature of Iraqi life before, during and since the depths of Saddam's regime. While the quality of life in Iraq plummeted as a result of Iran-Iraq War and subsequent conflicts, the women had never before been forced to flee for their lives -- until America's inept occupation of their country spawned anarchy.
High Tea in Mosul ... published August 1, 2007 by Cyan Communications
The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward -- A New Approach
by The Iraq Study Group
It's heartening to see that this long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group is, three days after its publication, outselling the latest offerings from the like of Grisham, Crichton ... even Martha Stewart. It helps that the 160-page paperback is presented in a format that even George Bush could conceivably grasp: 79 easy-to-read bullet points. Co-chairs Baker and Hamilton acknowledge that the course they recommend
demands a tremendous amount of political will and cooperation by the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. It demands skillful implementation. It demands unity of effort by government agencies. And its success depends on the unity of the American people in a time of political polarization. Americans can and must enjoy the right of robust debate within a democracy. Yet U.S. foreign policy is doomed to failure -- as is any course of action in Iraq -- if it is not supported by a broad, sustained consensus. The aim of our report is to move our country toward such a consensus.
The complete report is available for free on the website of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
The Iraq Study Group Report ... published December 6, 2006 by Vintage
On the Brink: An Insider's Account of
How the White House Compromised American Intelligence
by Tyler Drumheller with Elaine Monaghan
A recently retired 25-year CIA veteran chronicles the encroachment in recent decades of politics on the agency's essential missions. While the processes of politicizing and bureaucratizing the CIA was well underway before Drumheller signed on, he shows that such problems were particularly severe during the Bush administration's inexorable march to war with Iraq. As head of the agency's European operations until 2005, he was positioned to observe at close range the intelligence debacle that led up to the invasion. He created a stir when he appeared on 60 Minutes in April 2006 (and on Frontline two months later), revealing that the Bush administration had resolutely ignored intelligence that ran contrary to the justifications it aggressively sought for invading Iraq. Says he, "The idea of going after Iraq was U.S. policy. It was going to happen one way or the other."
On the Brink ... published October 28, 2006 by Carroll & Graf
The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
Having been in Iraq since before the invasion, The Independent's Iraq correspondent brings his 27 years' experience as a Middle East correspondent to bear in providing textured and extraordinarily incisive views of the invasion and occupation. Cockburn writes with a depth, nuance and raw accuracy that's simply not found in most American MSM reporting. In mid-2006 he wrote that Iraq was in the throes of
a civil war waged by assassins and death squads. Iraq is breaking up into its constituent communities. The Sunni minority in Basra are in flight; Shia Arabs and Kurds are being forced out of the parts of majority Sunni provinces where they are not strong enough to defend themselves; Kurds in Mosul, divided by the Tigris river, are moving from the Sunni Arab west bank to the east bank where Kurds are the majority. But it is Baghdad, with a population of six million, that is the heart of the conflict. [ ¶ ] The Sunni Arabs are fighting for their districts and the Shia for theirs like Beirut at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975.
The Occupation ... published October 19, 2006 by Verso
Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Iraq by Christian Alfonsi
The roots of the current Iraq catastrophe lie in the 1990-91 Gulf War says Alfonsi, who spent a decade researching and interviewing U.S. principals about the long conflict; it was the subject of his Harvard doctoral thesis. His access to key officials in both Bush administrations was excellent, as is his use of just-declassified government docs. Alfonsi sets forth compelling arguments that leaving Saddam in power after the 1990-91 Gulf War was a calculated decision on the parts of officials in Bush I -- many of whom, of course, also serve in Bush II. But the results were unexpectedly poor, and many of those who orchestrated the original conflict increasingly saw Saddam as unfinished business. More ominous still is the possibility that some of those in or close to both Bush administrations were determined that any adverse political consequences that Bush I may have suffered as a result on the 1990-91 war would be ameliorated under Bush II.
Circle in the Sand ... published October 10, 2006 by DoubleDay
Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57
by Michael Weisskopf
A veteran Time magazine reporter who lost an arm to an Iraqi grenade tells of his recovery and rehabilitation as well as those of three American soldiers who also lost limbs in Iraq. Unlike most recent Iraq books, this one's not overtly political. It deals, rather, with some of the raw personal realities now facing many Iraq War veterans. For example, Weisskopf writes of his prosthetic device,
The arrival of my myoelectric arm in the first week of February was more exciting than a new pair of shoes - but no more comfortable to wear. Just getting it on was painful: my stump was still incredibly tender. If my former right hand had floated lightly, the fake one moved like a dumbbell - fat, clunky and heavy. Its 2 1/2 lbs. were concentrated in the electronic hand - the place farthest from the half-forearm. I kept bumping it into things. I named it Ralph, after the clumsiest kid in my grade school. [ ¶ ] Ralph didn't work any better than he looked.
Blood Brothers ... published October 3, 2006 by Henry Holt and Co.
Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now
by George McGovern and William R. Polk
After America spurned George McGovern's wisdom 34 years ago things went rather badly for the nation, as I recall. Maybe listening closely now to what he's got to say -- this time, about a systematic but speedy withdrawal from Iraq -- would be a good idea. With the help of William Polk, McGovern provides a detailed schematic for getting American troops out of Iraq by June 30, 2007. After the U.S. is gone (and as we're leaving), say McGovern and Polk, we should pay for a multinational Arab and Muslim security force and the rebuilding of Iraq's shattered infrastructure. America will save billions of dollars by being generous with our financial support for Iraq. Paying from afar the reparations that any kind of decency says we owe Iraq for what we've done to it will be vastly less expensive than the thousands of deaths and quarter-billion dollars a day that being in Iraq now costs us.
McGovern spoke with Andrea Seabrook on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. A condensed version of the plan is featured in this month's Harper's.
Out of Iraq ... published October 3, 2006 by Simon and Schuster
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward
In his first two books about BushCo, Woodward, to his discredit, treated the most ruinously deranged and inept presidency in U.S. history with kid-glove deference. The reformed Republican water bearer's third installment, however, is another matter altogether -- an effort, perhaps, to rescue his legacy from the disrepute with which he'd intermittently flirted since helping to break the Watergate story over 30 years ago.
This time Woodward paints a highly credible and profoundly damning portrait of an administration riven by divisions so deep that Bush had to order Donald Rumsfeld to return Condoleeza Rice's calls and Andrew Card twice tried to get Rumsfeld fired. We see also that Bush continues to support Rumsfeld in large part for starkly political reasons, even though many if not most of Rumsfeld's colleagues now view him with raw contempt. And it turns out that Bush and Cheney meet regularly with Henry Kissinger. Who better to advise about catastrophic wars of imperialist aggression? Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the revelation that George Tenet and Cofer Black met with Rice on July 10, 2001 to warn of an imminent Al Qaeda attack and to "shake Rice" so she'd persuade Bush to respond to the threat. Rice gave them "the brush-off."
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD
State of Denial ... published September 30, 2006 by Simon & Schuster
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
The former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post says that, contrary to currently prevailing conventional wisdom, the catastrophic failure of the Iraq occupation was not completely inevitable. Rather, he shows that the incompetence and corruption fostered during the tenure of the CPA under the administration of Paul Bremer made a bad situation impossible. Says Chandrasekaran,
The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.
Imperial Life in the Emerald City ... published September 19, 2006 by Knopf
Not One More Death by Harold Pinter, et. al.
At 64 pages, this is no book but a pamphlet -- and what a pamphlet! Published in collaboration with the British Stop the War Coalition, it offers some of the most lucid, powerful and full-throated rage against the Iraq War that one's likely to find anywhere. Included are essays by John Le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Brian Eno, Michel Faber, Harold Pinter and Haifa Zangana. The point of a collection such as this is not merely to read its constituent parts for one's own edification, but to pass it from citizen to citizen in the hope that heretofore misled Americans may yet grasp the war's -- and its instigators' -- monstrousness. These essays might be especially helpful for "moderate" Americans who suspect that the Iraq War might still be "winnable" and who believe that Bush and the GOP are our best possible choices to prosecute an effective "war on terror." For a taste of what's included, check out Dawkins's "Bin Laden's victory" or a transcript of Pinter's Nobel Prize acceptance speech or Le Carré's "The United States of America Has Gone Mad." Then read the whole pamphlet -- and pass it on.
Not One More Death ... published September 19, 2006 by Verso
The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
The gents from the Center for Media and Democracy are back, reprising such works asBanana Republicans and Weapons of Mass Deception. This time they're focused on the propaganda that the Bush administration has used to drum up support for invading Iraq. The problem may not be lying per se, but that BushCo lied and then started to believe its own lies. Says Sheldon Rampton,
[S]elf-delusion and the arrogance of empire -- combined, of course, with America's emotional desire to lash out following 9/11 -- did as much to get us into war as any particular rational motive. Irrational forces sometimes account for a lot in explaining why nations do what they do. When European nations threw themselves into the First World War, some people must have imagined that there were spoils to be won, but in reality they got mutual ruination for all parties. Afterwards someone asked a journalist named Karl Weigand why nations go to war, and his answer was, "Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print." That's as likely an explanation for how we got into Iraq as anything else I've seen.
The Best War Ever ... published September 14, 2006 by Tarcher
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and
The Selling of the Iraq War by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
As so many before them have done, Isikoff and Corn unload a warehouse of proof that the Bush administration aggressively lied America into the Iraq catastrophe. Among the worst is the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson. Not only was she undercover CIA when the administration intentionally blew her cover, she was coordinating investigations of whether or not Saddam had WMDs. Corn says she
was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.
Hubris ... published September 8, 2006 by Crown
Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and
Corporate Greed in Iraq by T. Christian Miller
An award-winning LA Times reporter who for several years has focused specifically on the Iraq reconstruction looks at what became of the $30 billion in U.S. funding (more than America spent on the Marshall Plan) that was earmarked for rebuilding Iraq. He finds that Americans have financed plenty of cronyism, corruption and "security," but far too little reconstruction. Says Miller,
Mismanagement, waste and outright fraud wiped out whatever chances there were for the Iraqi nation-building experiment. The U.S.-led occupation government couldn't adequately account for almost $9 billion funneled to Iraqi ministries. And a convicted American felon was entrusted with $82 million, much of which went missing. The U.S. may have built a nuclear bomb in four years, but it has yet to make the toilets flush in Baghdad's slums. Now, the original funds are running out, and the only new money is for training and equipping the Iraqi armed forces. Maliki's pleas to Congress for more were met with polite applause and an empty wallet. With Congress frustrated and elections looming, the U.S. appears ready to largely abandon the project.
Blood Money ... published August 29, 2006 by Little, Brown
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq by James Fallows
This slim but important volume consists primarily of five exceptionally fine articles that Fallows published in the Atlantic from 2002 to 2005. Central to the tale is the Bush administration's chronic disregard for expert advice regarding Iraq. Among those the author holds most culpable for the Iraqi catastrophe are Rumsfeld, Republican "triumphalists" and Bush himself. Says Fallows,
Leadership is always a balance between making large choices and being aware of details. George W. Bush has an obvious preference for large choices. This gave him his chance for greatness after the September 11 attacks. But his lack of curiosity about significant details may be his fatal weakness. When the decisions of the past eighteen months are assessed and judged, the Administration will be found wanting for its carelessness. Because of warnings it chose to ignore, it squandered American prestige, fortune, and lives.
Blind Into Baghdad ... published August 15, 2006 by Vintage
Babylon by Bus by Ray LeMoine and Jeff Neumann, with Donovan Webster
Shortly after their team's heartbreaking 2003 American League playoff debacle, two boozy young Red Sox fans finagled jobs in association with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Though neither was especially political, they were generally opposed to the war, but interested in helping Iraqis and supporting American troops. They arrived in Baghdad Jan. 17, 2004, creating and operating a reasonably effective NGO, but left less than three months later, after being informed that they'd been targeted for assassination. The duo's been compared to Bill and Ted, as well as to Hunter Thompson and Jack Kerouac, and their storytelling can be as alternately brilliant and ethically sound -- or as scattershot and dissipated -- as any of those. But their outrage at the staggering American mismanagement and idiocy that they experienced firsthand is fully supported by the tales they tell. "The most shocking thing was ... America's total incompetence during the occupation. America robbed, killed and tortured Iraqis, and helped give them a civil war."
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD
Babylon by Bus ... published August 3, 2006 by Penguin Press HC
The Prince of the Marshes ... And Other
Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart
Stewart, a Scottish adventurer, diplomat, and the author of the acclaimed The Places in Between, returns with another collection of compelling tales well told. As the Iraq invasion unfolded, he traveled to Baghdad to volunteer his skills as an administrator in a "post-conflict environment." He was posted first to Maysan province, then to Dhi Qar. Of his inaugural week Stewart says,
I had spent my first week in Maysan deciding how to mediate in a tribal war, deal with a flood, regulate religious flagellants, advise on the architecture of the souk, patch a split within a political party [of which there are dozens], set up a television station, arrange an election and equip the police with guns.
Beyond those initial challenges, Stewart spent a year at his posts, working to rebuild schools and other basic civil infrastructure while constantly struggling to balance the interests of a mind-numbing array of local factions.
Prince of the Marshes ... published July 26, 2006 by Harcourt
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks
The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent shows that prior to the Iraq invasion, many of America's military leaders had grave misgivings about invading. While that ground's been covered elsewhere, Ricks also offers a new look how American civilian (and some military) leaders have botched the occupation. Because he's been on the military beat for so long (previously with the Wall Street Journal), Ricks is in a position to quote, at length and on the record, a surprising number of currently serving military personnel about the staggering incompetence that has led to the current situation in Iraq. One of the core problems is that although much was known about counterinsurgency warfare, many Americans responsible for trying to bring order to Iraq ignored the basic principles of counterinsurgency warfare -- many of which had been bitterly learned in Vietnam. Due to their willful ignorance, many of those leaders then egregiously violated those precepts, adding jet fuel to the insurgency's conflagration.
Terry Gross interviewed Ricks on NPR's Fresh Air.
Fiasco ... published July 25, 2006 by Penguin Press HC
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence
Created a War Without End by Peter W. Galbraith
A widely respected diplomat and writer who's spent decades in the Balkans and Middle East says BushCo's Iraq fiasco unintentionally terminated Iraq as a single nation. In its place, observes the son of the late Democratic economist John Kenneth Galbraith, are three increasingly autonomous areas: those of Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurds. Says Galbraith the younger,
The conventional response to discussions of Iraq's breakup is to say it would be destabilizing. This is a misreading of Iraq's modern history. It is the holding of Iraq together by force that has been destabilizing. This has led to big armies, repressive governments, squandered oil revenues, genocide at home, and aggression abroad. Today, America's failed effort to build a unified and democratic Iraq has spawned a ferocious insurgency and a Shiite theocracy.
Galbraith spoke about the breakup of Iraq on NPR's All Things Considered.
The End of Iraq ... published July 11, 2006 by Simon and Schuster
In the Belly of the Green Bird:
The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq by Nir Rosen
Despite the fact that he's still only in his twenties, Nir Rosen is one of the most effective journalists the West's had in Iraq. Thanks to his Middle Eastern features and command of Iraqi Arabic, Rosen has been able to exercise a freedom of movement throughout the length and breadth of Iraq that no Anglo reporter could survive. But that's not to diminish in any way his reportorial skills, which are superb. The basic understandings of Iraq and its region that he conveys are nuanced and sophisticated yet direct and clear, as is the analysis he provides. To those he adds judiciously chosen anecdotes and vivid storytelling, giving the reader a consistently powerful Iraqi's-eye view that's generally lacking from other coverage of the occupation. Unsurprisingly, Rosen's calling for American withdrawal from Iraq to begin immediately, particularly since he estimates that the process will take at least six months to complete.
In the Belly of the Green Bird ... published May 2, 2006 by Free Press
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal by Anthony Arnove, with Howard Zinn
A well-traveled writer, editor, and activist explains why America should leave Iraq now. Most of us had already been persuaded of that, but the terse feistiness of this polemic makes it a refreshing read. The book's partly inspired by Howard Zinn's 1967 classic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal; Zinn's now written both foreword and afterword for Arnove's rationale for a building a grassroots movement to end the Iraq occupation. In addition to making a solid case for an immediate troop withdrawal, the author further suggests that Bush and his fellow war criminals be called to account. Says Arnove,
If there were any genuine justice for the people of Iraq, not only would the politicians responsible for this unjust war face prosecution for their crimes, but the U.S. government would be required to pay reparations to the Iraqi people and to the families of U.S. soldiers who have been maimed and killed by its criminal actions.
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal ... published April 18, 2006 by The New Press
The Secret Way to War by Mark Danner
Given today's publication of Mark Danner's book about the Downing Street memo and related documents, may the MSM do now what they damn well should have done 11 months ago: hammer without ceasing the fact that Bush blatantly and repeatedly lied to the world for months (at least), insisting right up to the invasion that the war was not inevitable. Eight months prior to the invasion the Brits learned this:
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Danner's "The Secret Way to War" first appeared last June as an extended article in the The New York Review of Books.
The Secret Way To War ... published April 4, 2006 by New York Review Books
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and
Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor
This volume constitutes the definitive history of the Iraq fiasco to this point. The authors' credentials are solid and their access to key players and documents was excellent; their work's won effusive and bipartisan praise. And it pulls few punches; for example, the Gordon and Trainor say of Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold's pre-war briefing of Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
As Newbold outlined the plan, which called for as many as 500,000 troops, it was clear that Rumsfeld was growing increasingly irritated. For Rumsfeld, the plan required too many troops and supplies and took far too long to execute. It was, Rumsfeld declared, the product of old thinking and the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the military.
Gordon and Trainor were featured on NPR's Talk of the Nation; Neal Conan and the show's producers and callers did unusually good jobs of drawing out the authors on salient, consequential issues.
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD
Cobra II ... published March 14, 2006 by Pantheon
Inside the Resistance by Zaki Chehab
A well-traveled Middle Eastern journalist (who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon) explains the origins and nature of the insurgency that's helping to spread death and fear through much of Iraq. He also shows how American blunders, great and small, have fostered the terrorism. Many incisive anecdotes and the author's deep familiarity with his region lend Chehab's work powerful credibility. He concludes,
The insurgency is flourishing and dominating the news from Iraq in such a way that its influence far outweighs its numbers. ... Zarqawi and his band of foreign fighters are widely despised, but they are profiting from the anger and frustration felt by Iraq's Sunni Arabs. Zarqawi and others like him will be defeated only after the local population and the government turn the tables on these terrorist militias and engage with the Sunni insurgents on a political level rather than as military enemies. It is true that the Americans have the capability to fight the insurgency more effectively than the current Iraqi security forces, but as history shows, a military can never defeat a guerrilla force without the support of the indigenous people.
Inside the Resistance ... published November 9, 2005 by Nation Books
Insurgent Iraq by Loretta Napoleoni
The author of Terror Incorporated and an NPR regular for international terrorism segments says that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is largely an out-of-control Western propaganda creation. She also asserts that the al Qaeda of 9/11 no longer exists, but that it's been transformed into an anti-imperialist ideology now attracting adherents worldwide. With the July 2005 London bombings in mind Napoleoni concludes,
The life history of al Zarqawi and many of his followers should teach us that more than war and repression, governments need to pursue prevention policies. What is needed is a policy of truth, based upon solid evidence and through that, a better understanding of the nature and motives of the jihadist movement and of its ideology, al Qaedism. ... A policy of truth will also enable us to pursue a domestic strategy focused not on the present generation of jihadists, but on the next, the one being forged today, the one as yet to fall into the web of Islamist terror indoctrination, the generation that we can stop from carrying out the next wave of bombings in our cities.
Amy Goodman interviewed Napoleoni after the Zarqawi-backed Jordan hotel bombings.
Insurgent Iraq ... published November 1, 2005 by Seven Stories Press
Just Another Soldier by Jason Christopher Hartley
Demoted for publishing a blog about what he was experiencing as an infantryman in Iraq, Hartley provides a grunt's-eye view of what BushCo foreign policy looks like on the ground. The author's an eclectic guy: an ACLU contributor concerned about human rights -- but who says he loves soldiering. His book is filled with realities that America desperately needs to confront today in passages such as the following:
As I try to fathom what it must feel like be a poverty-stricken eight-year-old girl and to experience the epic pain of having your family suddenly and violently killed in front of you, I have to pause and ask myself, Now what am I doing here again? I know this kind of thing happens in combat, and I kind of expected to see it but, Jesus, the record is pretty bad so far. Since I've been in Iraq in situations that my platoon has responded to, there have been three dead bad guys, two wounded civilians (one critically), and seven dead civilians, including four women, one three-year-old girl, and one mentally unstable homosexual man on a moped. Hell, if you count the suicide of the latter's lover -- an excellent 2-for-1 dead civilian deal -- and the de-familyd guy who got his balls blown off who, even if he lived, would have wished to Allah that he was dead, that makes the tally 3 to 8, a near 1:3 ratio of dead evildoers to innocent and ridiculously poor Iraqis who couldn't have cared less who led their country just so long as they were able to feed themselves.
Just Another Soldier ... first published October 4, 2005 by HarperCollins
The Assassin's Gate by George Packer
A New Yorker staff writer (and author of The Fight Is for Democracy and Blood of Liberals) who's been to Iraq four times has watched the situation there deteriorate and has become "gloomy" about how things have gone and are going. (Imagine that.) In an NPR interview last week he said, "Iraq is already in the middle of a low-grade civil war that could become much more large-scale and violent." Says Packer,
[T]hose in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War has always been winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.
The Assassin's Gate ... first pub'd September 22, 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadid
Shadid won a 2004 Pulitzer for his Iraq reporting; this book shows why he undoubtedly deserved it. Of Lebanese descent and fluent in Arabic, Shadid has worked extensively in the Middle East, and was in Iraq before, during, and since the American invasion. He characterizes its capital city, in Arabic, as ghamidha ("mysterious" or "ambiguous"), but his tales of ordinary Baghdad citizens certainly make it less so.
Those Iraqis whose stories he tells are young, old, devout Muslims and not, and hail from a variety of social circumstances. Resentment of the occupation has, we see, developed for a great variety of reasons. Killing nearly 30,000 Iraqi civilians hasn't helped; Shadid chronicles some of those deaths. He also shows how Americans habitually alienate Iraqis by violating their basic social norms. Most significantly, perhaps, day-to-day life under American rule of the deeply factionalized (and sub-factionalized) country is marked by severe shortages of basic goods and services, and it's extremely dangerous. Iraq's future? Ghamidha.
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD.
Night Draws Near ... first published August 11, 2005 by Henry Holt
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell by John Crawford
When Army vet Crawford joined the National Guard, he thought weekend service would pay for his education; trying to survive Iraq was not part of the plan. Once George Bush changed his itinerary, however, Crawford found himself in an environment that was half college frathouse, half sand-blown nightmare. When the boys are on their own time, the resulting stories can be crudely funny. Often, though, the laughter stops:
Harris was up, still on a knee, his rifle at his shoulder. Twenty meters away a hajji dressed in black and carrying a nine-millimeter pistol fled toward a waiting red Volkswagen Passat. Harris fired once, then twice more in succession. The attacker spun around, carried by the impact of bullets in his chest and head. By the second shot, only momentum kept him on his feet; his arms flailed at his side and his head hung limply on his gaping chest. Before anyone else could react, he was down, lifeless in a pool of his own blood.
Crawford maintains that same kind of economy and tone throughout, so it's a fast, dreamlike read -- that does not end sunnily. The book's arresting title is explained in its final, heartbreaking sentences; sentences that speak volumes about the depth of human desolation now being wrought in Iraq.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD.
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell ... first pub'd August 4, 2005 by Riverhead Hardcover
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