Download or read book Wanting War written by Jeffrey Record and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A complete explanation of the U.S. decision to go to war in 2003.
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.
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 Explaining the Iraq War written by Frank P. Harvey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Matter of Principle written by Thomas Cushman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-07-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Why Did the United States Invade Iraq written by Jane K. Cramer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume presents the foremost scholarly thinking on why the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in both modern US foreign policy and international politics. In the years since the US invasion of Iraq it has become clear that the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not as urgent as the Bush administration presented it and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with either Al Qaeda or 9/11. Many consider the war a mistake and question why Iraq was invaded. A majority of Americans now believe that the public were deliberately misled by the Bush administration in order to bolster support for the war. Public doubt has been strengthened by the growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion that suggest the administration was not candid about its reasons for wanting to take action against Iraq. This volume begins with a survey of private scholarly views about the war’s origins, then assesses the current state of debate by organising the best recent thinking by foreign policy and international relations experts on why the US invaded Iraq. The book covers a broad range of approaches to explaining Iraq – the role of the uncertainty of intelligence, cognitive biases, ideas, Israel, and oil, highlighting areas of both agreement and disagreement. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.
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 Understanding the U S Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written by Beth Bailey and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-12-18 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book War Plan Iraq written by Milan Rai and published by Verso. This book was released on 2002-11-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the United States' hidden role in the collapse of the U.N. weapons inspection agency, UNSCOM, this book demonstrates that a war with Iraq would be in violation of international law and could precipitate a world recession with dire consequences for the world's poor.
Download or read book War and Health written by Catherine Lutz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a detailed look at how war affects human life and health far beyond the battlefield Since 2010, a team of activists, social scientists, and physicians have monitored the lives lost as a result of the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan through an initiative called the Costs of War Project. Unlike most studies of war casualties, this research looks beyond lives lost in violence to consider those who have died as a result of illness, injuries, and malnutrition that would not have occurred had the war not taken place. Incredibly, the Cost of War Project has found that, of the more than 1,000,000 lives lost in the recent US wars, a minimum of 800,000 died not from violence, but from indirect causes. War and Health offers a critical examination of these indirect casualties, examining health outcomes on the battlefield and elsewhere—in hospitals, homes, and refugee camps—both during combat and in the years following, as communities struggle to live normal lives despite decimated social services, lack of access to medical care, ongoing illness and disability, malnutrition, loss of infrastructure, and increased substance abuse. The volume considers the effect of the war on both civilians and on US service members, in war zones—where healthcare systems have been destroyed by long-term conflict—and in the United States, where healthcare is highly developed. Ultimately, it draws much-needed attention to the far-reaching health consequences of the recent US wars, and argues that we cannot go to war—and remain at war—without understanding the catastrophic effect war has on the entire ecosystem of human health.
Download or read book A War Against Truth written by Paul William Roberts and published by Raincoast Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I write in a state of raging anger and shame about what I saw. A fraud was perpetrated on the entire world. A weak and defenseless nation was invaded and occupied by the greatest superpower in history on a pretext that is a transparent deception, a lie. This should bother someone. My friend Bassim and his whole family were killed. This bothers me."A classical scholar and one of the few journalists to have interviewed Saddam Hussein, Canadian reporter Paul William Roberts knows Iraq better than most. And he was in Baghdad when the bombs started falling. This is his expose of the politics behind the recent war-and the brutal reality on the ground. It follows The Demonic Comedy, which the Globe and Mail called "funny, beguiling, poignant, powerful and very good indeed, [and] probably also has the unusual bonus feature of being true."
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 The Iraq Wars and America s Military Revolution written by Keith L. Shimko and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive study of the Iraq Wars in the context of the revolution in military affairs debate.
Download or read book War Without End written by Michael Schwartz and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Schwartz gets behind the headlines, revealing the real dynamics of the Iraq debacle and its legacy.
Download or read book The War in Iraq written by (None) and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2003-05-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents more than 250 photographs from different perspectives of the 2003 war in Iraq, gathered from international photographers, and includes pieces of Saddam Hussein's art and pictures from his personal photo album.
Download or read book Weapons of Mass Persuasion written by Paul Rutherford and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weapons of Mass Persuasion chronicles the making of a Hollywood war: fast-paced and heroic, pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil to achieve a triumphant, sanitized, and commodified outcome.
Download or read book Breaking Ranks written by Matthew C. Gutmann and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Breaking Ranks eloquently documents the many ways that militarism infiltrates ordinary lives, and is a powerful reminder of the personal costs of war. A model of sensitive and perceptive analysis of oral history interviews, Breaking Ranks reaches its audience on many levels. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about better connecting intellectually and humanly with the current political moment."—Robert A. Rubinstein, The Maxwell School of Syracuse University "Breaking Ranks is extraordinarily well written, lively and compelling. This is the first book to combine gripping, personal stories of anti-war Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with rigorous academic analysis."—Aaron Glantz, author of The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans "As Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz show in this timely and important book, soldiers can and do think on their own and come to political and ethical conclusions that often run contrary to what the military might want, expect, or portray. In Breaking Ranks, Gutmann and Lutz give us a valuable addition to our understanding of soldiers, politics, and ethics."—Andrew Bickford, George Mason University
