Summary
Sluglett reviews five books about Iraq, including Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq by Larry Diamond, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco by David Phillips, and Revolt on the Tigris: the al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq by Mark Etherington.
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Extract
Blunder Books: Iraq Since Saddam
Blunder Books: Iraq Since Saddam My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, by L. Paul Bremer (with Malcolm McConnell). New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. 400 pages. $27.
Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, by Larry Diamond. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. 370 pages. $25.Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, by David Phillips. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2005. 292 pages. $25.Revolt on the Tigris: the al-Sadr Uprising and the Governing of Iraq, by Mark Etherington. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 252 pages. $25.Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadows of America's War, by Anthony Shadid. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. 424 pages. $26.The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 467 pages. $26.Every so often over the past so many years, and almost always against my better judgment, I find myself giving a talk entitled "Which Way is Iraq Going?" or "Whither Iraq?" or some variation thereof. The last time I gave such a talk was at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in September 2005. While on previous occasions I could generally find something more or less positive to say - the evident relief among wide sections of the population that the dictatorship had come to an end; the capture of Saddam Husayn; the prospect, then the reality of elections - that last time in Ann ...See the full content of this document
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