Download or read book Confronting Saddam Hussein written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Based on a unique set of interviews and British and American documents, this book examines the motives for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, examines the decision-making inside the Bush administration, and assesses the reasons for the chaotic, bloody, and costly occupation. The attack on America on 9/11 by al Qaeda terrorists transformed the thinking and actions of Bush and his top advisers. Bush conceived the administration's response. Fear, power, and hubris shaped his approach - fear of another attack; pride in American values; and confidence in America's ability to effectuate change. Worried about another attack on American soil - this time with biological or chemical weapons - Bush turned his attention to Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's history with weapons of mass destruction and because of his record of aggression, brutality, and duplicity. To achieve his goals, the American president embraced a strategy of coercive diplomacy. If Iraq faced a military threat, Bush hoped Hussein would open his country to inspections, relinquish his alleged weapons of mass destruction, flee, or be toppled. When Hussein admitted inspectors yet remained obstructive, Bush denounced the dictator's defiance and believed America's credibility was at stake. Without resolving the ambiguities and inconsistencies in his strategy of coercive diplomacy and failing to assess the consequences of an invasion or to plan effectively for its many contingencies, Bush ordered U.S. troops to invade Iraq. Friction and acrimony within the administration turned the occupation into a tragedy, the consequences of which we are still living with"--

Download or read book Confronting Iraq written by Daniel Byman and published by Rand Corporation. This book was released on 2000 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Iraq remains hostile to the United States, Baghdad has repeatedly compromised, and at times caved, in response to U.S. pressure and threats. An analysis of attempts to coerce Iraq since Desert Storm reveals that military strikes and other forms of pressure that threatened Saddam Husayn's relationship with his power base proved effective at forcing concessions from the Iraqi regime. When coercing Saddam or other foes, U.S. policymakers should design a strategy around the adversary's center of gravity while seeking to neutralize adversary efforts to counter-coerce the United States and appreciating the policy constraints imposed by domestic politics and international alliances.

Download or read book Confronting al Qaeda written by Martha L. Cottam and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on in-depth interviews with tribal Sheiks involved in the Awakening and their American military counterparts, Confronting al Qaeda is a study of decision-making processes and the political psychology of the Sunni Awakening in al Anbar. It traces the change in American military strategy that made the Awakening collaboration between the Sunni tribes and the U.S. forces possible. It explains how the evolution of the tribal leaders’ perspective and of the American military strategy led to defeat al Qaeda in al Anbar. The process of these changing mutual images is detailed as well as how the cooperation between groups led to further evolution of perceptions. Political and military realities urgently forced these perceptual and social identity shifts initially, but the process of cooperation and engagement accelerated these shifts through increasingly mutually beneficial cooperation and interaction during the battle with al Qaeda in Iraq.

Download or read book Revisions in Need of Revising What Went Wrong in the Iraq War written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker examine the contentious debate over the Iraq war and occupation, focusing on the critique that the Bush administration squandered an historic opportunity to reconstruct the Iraqi state because of various critical blunders in planning. Though they conclude that critics have made a number of telling points against the Bush administration's conduct of the Iraq war, they argue that the most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers -- criminal anarchy and lawlessness, a raging insurgency, and a society divided into rival and antagonistic groups -- were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the act of war itself. Military and civilian planners were culpable in failing to plan for certain tasks, but the most serious problems had no good solution. The authors draw attention to a variety of lessons, including the danger that the imperatives of "force protection" may sacrifice the broader political mission of U.S. forces and the need for skepticism over the capacity of outsiders to develop the skill and expertise required to reconstruct decapitated states.

Download or read book Mission Rejected written by Peter Laufer and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A shattering journey of revelation, pain, and betrayal, Mission Rejected takes the reader deep into the turmoil of U.S. troops confronting the Iraq War.

Download or read book Confronting Iraq written by David Masci and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Confronting Backlash States written by Anthony Lake and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Threatening Storm written by Kenneth Pollack and published by Random House. This book was released on 2003-03-25 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Threatening Storm, Kenneth M. Pollack, one of the world’s leading experts on Iraq, provides a masterly insider’s perspective on the crucial issues facing the United States as it moves toward a new confrontation with Saddam Hussein. For the past fifteen years, as an analyst on Iraq for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack has studied Saddam as closely as anyone else in the United States. In 1990, he was one of only three CIA analysts to predict the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. As the principal author of the CIA’s history of Iraqi military strategy and operations during the Gulf War, Pollack gained rare insight into the methods and workings of what he believes to be the most brutal regime since Stalinist Russia. Examining all sides of the debate and bringing a keen eye to the military and geopolitical forces at work, Pollack ultimately comes to this controversial conclusion: through our own mistakes, the perfidy of others, and Saddam’s cunning, the United States is left with few good policy options regarding Iraq. Increasingly, the option that makes the most sense is for the United States to launch a full-scale invasion, eradicate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society—for the good of the United States, the Iraqi people, and the entire region. Pollack believed for many years that the United States could prevent Saddam from threatening the stability of the Persian Gulf and the world through containment—a combination of sanctions and limited military operations. Here, Pollack explains why containment is no longer effective, and why other policies intended to deter Saddam ultimately pose a greater risk than confronting him now, before he gains possession of nuclear weapons and returns to his stated goal of dominating the Gulf region. “It is often said that war should be employed only in the last resort,” Pollack writes. “I reluctantly believe that in the case of the threat from Iraq, we have come to the last resort.” Offering a view of the region that has the authority and force of an intelligence report, Pollack outlines what the leaders of neighboring Arab countries are thinking, what is necessary to gain their support for an invasion, how a successful U.S. operation would be mounted, what the likely costs would be, and how Saddam might react. He examines the state of Iraq today—its economy, its armed forces, its political system, the status of its weapons of mass destruction as best we understand them, and the terrifying security apparatus that keeps Saddam in power. Pollack also analyzes the last twenty years of relations between the United States and Iraq to explain how the two countries reached the unhappy standoff that currently prevails. Commanding in its insights and full of detailed information about how leaders on both sides will make their decisions, The Threatening Storm is an essential guide to understanding what may be the crucial foreign policy challenge of our time.

Download or read book U S Options in Confronting Iraq written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Better Country written by Arthur M. Borden and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2008 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Borden's A Better Country demonstrates why America was right to confront Saddam Hussein. This book analyzes the public debate over Iraq to show how partisanship has obscured the purposes of the war effort and promoted a mistaken image of American power both domestically and abroad. A Better Country reminds us that, stretching back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter and before, there had been a broad consensus over the touchstone issues of Iraq, the Middle East and the unmentionable reality of oil--until political argument became degraded by charges of betrayal and wholesale deception. Taking by turn the key points of argument-from weapons of mass destruction and the inspectors to containment and the imminence of the threat from aggressive Iraq-Borden argues that even the Administration failed to present clearly the true nature of the security risks facing America. From George Bush and Hans Blix to Meet the Press and The New York Times, this book provides a lively account of how America--over its airways, through its newspapers and thus within its living rooms--argues out the great issues of the day. Written by a veteran World War II and of the many political crises since, this book is underlined by a personal narrative about the meaning of America and of American power at its best. It renews the principle that, in rising to address security risks in an uncertain world, America itself becomes a better county.

Download or read book A History of the Iraq Crisis written by Frédéric Bozo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 2003, the United States and Great Britain invaded Iraq to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. The war was launched without a United Nations mandate and was based on the erroneous claim that Iraq had retained weapons of mass destruction. France, under President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, spectacularly opposed the United States and British invasion, leading a global coalition against the war that also included Germany and Russia. The diplomatic crisis leading up to the war shook both French and American perceptions of each other and revealed cracks in the transatlantic relationship that had been building since the end of the Cold War. Based on exclusive French archival sources and numerous interviews with former officials in both France and the United States, A History of the Iraq Crisis retraces the international exchange that culminated in the 2003 Iraq conflict. It shows how and why the Iraq crisis led to a confrontation between two longtime allies unprecedented since the time of Charles de Gaulle, and it exposes the deep and ongoing divisions within Europe, the Atlantic alliance, and the international community as a whole. The Franco-American narrative offers a unique prism through which the American road to war can be better understood.

Download or read book U S Options in Confronting Iraq written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Confronting Iraq U S Poilcy and the Use of Force Since the Gulf War written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Successful coercion, a cornerstone of an effective foreign policy, depends on the proper application of military force. Despite its overwhelming military power, however, the United States often fails to coerce successfully. To help understand this problem, this study assesses attempts to coerce Iraq since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Although Iraq remains hostile to the United States and its allies, Baghdad has also repeatedly compromised, and at times even caved, in response to U.S. and allied pressure. The story behind this mixed record illustrates Baghdad's strengths and weaknesses and highlights general lessons about limits on the U.S. ability to bring its full power to bear when coercing foes.

Download or read book Debriefing the President written by John Nixon (Middle East expert) and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Saddam Hussein after his capture explains why preconceived ideas about the dictator led Washington policymakers and the Bush White House astray.

Download or read book Confronting Poverty in Iraq written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2011-01-10 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report provides the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis of Iraqi income and expenditure in several decades. The report makes extensive use of the Iraq Household Socio-Economic Survey, the first nationwide income and expenditure survey since 1988. IHSES data is complemented income and expenditure data from a wide range of other measures of living standards, allowing us to analyze living standards in a holistic way. The analysis presented here was performed with two main goals first, to inform the Government s Poverty Reduction Strategy; and second, to serve as a baseline for future assessments of changes in living standards and the identification of critical issues for deeper examination. Iraqi living standards have two unusual characteristics. First, they have fallen over the past generation. Second, they feature surprisingly little inequality. These characteristics are both rooted in Iraq s recent history of authoritarian government, war, military occupation, insurgency, and civil strife leading to infrastructure destruction and population displacement. There have been few opportunities for individuals to prosper from professional or entrepreneurial activities. Decades of neglected investment have resulted in deterioration of social services and economic infrastructure. Consequently, individuals have lacked capabilities to prosper and an investment climate conducive to prosperity. School enrollment and life expectancy have declined. Extremely low returns to education reflect the combination of poor educational quality and lack of employment opportunities. In terms of economic infrastructure, access to reliable electricity and water, and even access to paved roads are low, are further reflections of decades of neglect. While the upper end of the distribution has been pulled down by a lack of opportunities, the lower end has been supported by direct government provision of food. The Public Distribution System (PDS) provides 85 percent of food needs. While PDS has been useful as a safety net for the poor and the vulnerable, the system is expensive, inefficient, and fiscally risky. Indeed, PDS food rations account for a far greater share of public spending than does education or health. Going forward, Iraq faces two main challenges. First, although Iraq does not have to develop from scratch, it faces a formidable challenge in re-development. Second, a shift by the Government is required from direct provision of basic subsistence toward investment in human capacities. The Government can provide an enabling environment through investments in economic infrastructure and services to business and citizens, thus allowing the population to make productive use of education and their own labor. Both challenges are now being taken up by the Poverty Reduction Strategy, which articulates a detailed set of required actions and outlines priorities for government spending.

Download or read book Presidential Policies and the Road to the Second Iraq War written by John Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By virtually any means of measurement, postwar Iraq has become a more bloodied and embattled settlement than ever envisaged. But were the seeds of these problems sown long before military force had been committed? This lucid and detailed examination of US foreign policy evaluates the continuity and divergence in the strategies of the Bush, Clinton and Bush Jr administrations and their efforts to respond to the Iraqi threat, and how those strategies have bequeathed a legacy of problems to those trying to rebuild a postwar Iraq. Offering the most comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that paved the way for renewed conflict in Iraq, the book provides a descriptive account of attempts to confront a host of political pressures, from the need for international cooperation in postwar Iraq, to dealing with the influx of foreign fighters and their quest to force American withdrawal. This essential volume provides analysts, observers and policy makers with guidelines and prescriptions about the future of postwar Iraq and detailed analysis of lessons learned both during and after the military and reconstruction phases.

Download or read book Confronting Iraq written by Daniel Byman and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: