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The War Over Iraq by Lawrence F. Kaplan,William Kristol Pdf
As the crisis with Iraq continues, Americans have questions. Is war really necessary? What can it accomplish? What broad vision of U.S. foreign policy underlies the determination to remove Saddam Hussein? What were the failures of the last couple of decades that brought us to a showdown with a dictator developing weapons of mass destruction? What is the relationship between war with Iraq and the events of 9-11? The answers to these questions are found in this timely book by two of America's leading foreign policy thinkers. Kristol and Kaplan lay out a detailed rationale for action against Iraq. But to understand why we must fight Saddam, the authors assert, it is necessary to go beyond the details of his weapons of mass destruction, his past genocidal actions against Iran and his own people, and the U.N. resolutions he has ignored. The explanation begins with how the dominant policy ideas of the last decade--Clintonian liberalism and Republican realpolitik--led American policymakers to turn a blind eye to the threat Iraq has posed for well over a decade. As Kristol and Kaplan make clear, the war over Iraq is in large part a war of competing ideas about America's role in the world. The authors provide the first comprehensive explanation of the strategy of "preemption" guiding the Bush Administration in dealing with this crisis. They show that American foreign policy for the 21st century is being forged in the crucible of our response to Saddam. The war over Iraq will presumably be the end of Saddam Hussein. But it will be the beginning of a new era in American foreign policy. William Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan are indispensable guides to the era that lies ahead.
An incisive account of the Persian Gulf War, Storm Over Iraq shows how the success of Operation Desert Storm was the product of two decades of profound changes in the American approach to defense, military doctrine, and combat operations. The first detailed analysis of why the Gulf War could be fought the way it was, the book examines the planning and preparation for war. Richard P. Hallion argues that the ascendancy of precision air power in warfare—which fulfilled the promise that air power had held for more than seventy-five years—reflects the revolutionary adaptation of a war strategy that targets things rather than people, allowing one to control an opposing nation without destroying it.
One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 “The detailed, nuanced, gripping account of that strange and complex journey offered in Robert Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is essential reading—now, especially now . . . Draper’s account [is] one for the ages . . . A must-read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most consequential decision in the history of American foreign policy--the decision to invade Iraq. Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of consequential new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book 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. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. 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 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 process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--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.
An on-the-ground commander describes his brigade's first year in Iraq after the U.S. forces seized Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and explains what went right and wrong as the U.S. military confronted an insurgency, in a firsthand analysis of success and failure in Iraq.
Current debate over the motives, ideological justifications, and outcomes of the war with Iraq have been strident and polarizing. A Matter of Principle is the first volume gathering critical voices from around the world to offer an alternative perspective on the prevailing pro-war and anti-war positions. The contribu-tors—political figures, public intellectuals, scholars, church leaders, and activists—represent the most powerful views of liberal internationalism. Offering alternative positions that challenge the status quo of both the left and the right, these essays claim that, in spite of the inconsistent justifications provided by the United States and its allies and the conflict-ridden process of social reconstruction, the war in Iraq has been morally justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, a flagrant violator of human rights, a force of global instability and terror, and a threat to world peace. The authors discuss the limitations of the current system of global governance, which tolerates gross violations of human rights and which has failed to prevent genocide in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. They also underscore the need for reform in international institutions and international law. At the same time, these essays do not necessarily attempt to apologize for the mistakes, errors, and deceptions in the way the Bush administration has handled the war. Disputing the idea that the only true liberal position on the war is to be against it, this volume charts an invaluable third course, a path determined by a strong liberal commitment to human rights, solidarity with the oppressed, and a firm stand against fascism, totalitarianism, and tyranny.
The almost universally accepted explanation for the Iraq War is very clear and consistent - the US decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime on March 19, 2003 was a product of the ideological agenda, misguided priorities, intentional deceptions and grand strategies of President George W. Bush and prominent 'neoconservatives' and 'unilateralists' on his national security team. Despite the widespread appeal of this version of history, Frank P. Harvey argues that it remains an unsubstantiated assertion and an underdeveloped argument without a logical foundation. His book aims to provide a historically grounded account of the events and strategies which pushed the US-UK coalition towards war. The analysis is based on both factual and counterfactual evidence, combines causal mechanisms derived from multiple levels of analysis and ultimately confirms the role of path dependence and momentum as a much stronger explanation for the sequence of decisions that led to war.
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.
Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by Beth Bailey,Richard H. Immerman Pdf
Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Investigates the causes, conduct, and consequences of the recent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Understanding the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to understanding the United States in the first decade of the new millennium and beyond. These wars were pivotal to American foreign policy and international relations. They were expensive: in lives, in treasure, and in reputation. They raised critical ethical and legal questions; they provoked debates over policy, strategy, and war-planning; they helped to shape American domestic politics. And they highlighted a profound division among the American people: While more than two million Americans served in Iraq and Afghanistan, many in multiple deployments, the vast majority of Americans and their families remained untouched by and frequently barely aware of the wars conducted in their name, far from American shores, in regions about which they know little. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gives us the first book-length expert historical analysis of these wars. It shows us how they began, what they teach us about the limits of the American military and diplomacy, and who fought them. It examines the lessons and legacies of wars whose outcomes may not be clear for decades. In 1945 few Americans could imagine that the country would be locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union for decades; fewer could imagine how history would paint the era. Understanding the U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begins to come to grips with the period when America became enmeshed in a succession of “low intensity” conflicts in the Middle East.
From 1980 to 1988 Iran and Iraq fought the longest conventional war of the century. It included tragic slaughter of child soldiers, use of chemical weapons, striking of civilian shipping, and destruction of cities. Pierre Razoux offers an unflinching look at a conflict seared into the region’s collective memory but little understood in the West.
“A valuable history [and] a stark warning to Washington policy and strategy makers.” —James Stejskal, former US Army Special Forces and CIA officer In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering over 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam’s army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer. Over the course of the next year, virtually every aspect of that plan for the conduct of the war in northern Iraq fell apart. The 4th Infantry Division never arrived, nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number. The Turks not only refused to provide support, they worked overtime to prevent the United States from achieving success. And an Arab army that was to assist US forces fell apart before it ever made it to the field. Alone, hopelessly outnumbered, short on supplies, and threatened by Iraqi assassination teams and Islamic extremists, Faddis’s team, working with Kurdish peshmerga, miraculously paved the way for a brilliant and largely bloodless victory in the North and the fall of Saddam’s Iraq. That victory, handed over to Washington and the Department of Defense on a silver platter, was then squandered. The decisions that followed would lead to catastrophic consequences that continue to this day. This is the story of the brave and effective team of men and women who overcame massive odds to help end the nightmare of Saddam’s rule. It is also the story of how incompetence, bureaucracy, and ignorance threw that success away and condemned Iraq and the surrounding region to chaos
A Pretext for War reveals the systematic weaknesses behind the failure to detect or prevent the 9/11 attacks, and details the Bush administration’s subsequent misuse of intelligence to sell preemptive war to the American people. Filled with unprecedented revelations, from the sites of “undisclosed locations” to the actual sources of America’s Middle East policy, A Pretext for War is essential reading for anyone concerned about the security of the United States. Acclaimed author James Bamford–whose classic book The Puzzle Palace first revealed the existence of the National Security Agency–draws on his unparalleled access to top intelligence sources to produce a devastating expose of the intelligence community and the Bush administration.
Winner of The Army Historical Foundation''s Distinguished Writing Award for Excellence in U.S. Army History Writing- Journals, memoirs and letters, June 2008Shortly after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the war in Iraq became the most confusing in U.S. history, the high command not knowing who to fight, who was attacking Coalition troops, and who among the different Iraqi groups were fighting each other. Yet there were a few astute officers like Lt. Col. Christopher Hughes, commanding the 2d Battalion of the 327th Inf. Regiment, 101st Airborne, who sensed the complexity of the task from the beginning.In "War on Two Fronts" Col. Hughes writes movingly of his "No-Slack" battalion at war in Iraq. The war got off to a bang for Hughes, when his brigade command tent was fragged by a Muslim sergeant in the 101st, leaving him briefly in charge of the brigade. Amid the nighttime confusion of 14 casualties, a nearby Patriot missile blasted off, panicking nearly everyone while mistakenly bringing down a British Tornado fighter-bomber.As Hughes'' battalion forged into Iraq they successfully liberated the city of Najaf, securing the safety of Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the Mosque of Ali, while showing an acute cultural awareness in doing so that caught the world''s attention. It was a feat that landed Hughes within the pages of Time, Newsweek and other publications. The "Screaming Eagles" of the 101st Airborne then implemented creative programs in the initial postwar occupation, including harvesting the national wheat and barley crops, while combating nearly invisible insurgents.Conscious that an army battalion is a community of some 700-plus households, and that when a unit goes off to war the families are intimately connected in our internet age, Hughes makes clear the strength of those connections and how morale is best supported at both ends. Transferred to Washington after his tour in Iraq, Hughes then writes an illuminating account of the herculean efforts of many in the Pentagon to work around the corporatist elements of its bureaucracy, in order to better understand counterinsurgency and national reconstruction, which Lawrence of Arabia characterized as "like learning to eat soup with a knife." To read this book will help understand the sources of mistakes made--and still being made--and the process needed to chart a successful strategy.Written with candor and no shortage of humor, intermixed with brutal scenes of combat and frank analysis, this book is a must-read for all those who seek insight into our current war in the Mideast.REVIEWS Winner of The Army Historical Foundation''s Distinguished Writing Award for Excellence in U.S. Army History Writing- Journals, memoirs and letters, June 2008"Hughes offers an insightful review of our problem in Iraq as a loyal supporter of President Bush...His book becomes genuinely thoughtful as he concludes that, while America was absolutely right to invade Iraq to depose an evil dictator, our ignorance of that nation ''s history and religion has led to chaos"Publisher''s Weekly, 8/27/07 "... a very clearly written appraisal that affords more than the usual perspective on what kind of cleaning up in the Pentagon will be needed when the war and the Bush administration have passed into history. Definitely valuable to serious students of defense issues."Booklist, 9/2007"...deserves your attention. Hughes is close enough to see the big picture and small details...unfiltered by media looking to sell paper or ratings..."Magweb.com, 09/2007"This battle narrative gives a clear and candid overview of how a leader deals with combat. . . . Likewise [Hughes] is clear about what he feels the strengths and successes of the army are, both in Iraq and institutionally. . . . Recommended."--Library Journal 11/2007"A first-class, personal account of combat in Iraq and how bureaucracies wage war. . . . War on Two Fronts makes real contributions to understanding battalion command in both conventional and unconventional operations, and to understanding the essence of full spectrum operations."--ARMY Magazine, 02/2008"...conveys the perceptive views of an exceptional officer who should definitely be bound for higher places."Proceedings Magazine, 07/2008"...engaging contemporaneous history... Hughes presents valuable eye witness accounts ... from himself, other officers, senior non-commissioned officers, and embedded media. ...is thoughtful while being purposeful and direct. ...provides many valuable lessons in effective leadership, combat innovation and "post hostility operations". Air Power History, 9/2008