Beyond The Iraq War

This is the story of the Marine Corps in the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). It tells how the Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) planned and prepared for war in 2002 and deployed to theater in early 2003, and then how it crossed the line of departure and fought its way to Baghdad--and beyond. Written by Marine Corps historian Col. Nicholas Reynolds, this first overview of the history of OIF is solidly grounded in oral history interviews and buttressed by official reports and firsthand journals. It describes not only the execution of the original plan but some of the unusual additions carried out by the Marines, including a small mission sent to Kurdistan to work with local fighters and a task force sent to seize Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. The book draws to a close with the commanders analyzing the lessons learned in this "transformational" war as the last Marine left the theater in the fall of 2003. While not intended as finished history, this authoritative analysis of what happened will prove useful to students of Marine Corps history and operations and easily accessible to the general reader who wants to understand what the Marines did in a historical context. It is certain to stimulate further research and healthy debate. Comprehensive notes are included for the reader who wants to learn more about a particular part of the war.

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.

How does the Iraq War affect the future world order? What kinds of problems has this war brought about, and what is needed to remedy these problems, so as to reconstruct an order in Iraq and beyond? The present volume is a collection of essays exploring these issues, written by leading scholars in their respective fields. Importantly, the Iraq War has caused numerous long-term security and economic problems in Iraq (Chapter 1) and in the Middle East (Chapter 2). In addition, this war represents a failure of the Western liberals' project of establishing a liberal market democracy, and these liberals are likely to repeat the same error elsewhere in the future (Chapter 3). Moreover, the war underlines the crisis in global governance today, but the idea of reforming the United Nations has some serious limitations (Chapter 4). With regard to the issue of terrorism, ?Al-Qaeda in Iraq? has been operating in the field for some time, and thus Iraq will likely remain an important global center of terrorism in the foreseeable future (Chapter 5).

This book critically analyses the topic of US-led external interventions in the affairs of developing countries by using one of the most contested experiments of modern times, namely, the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq has so far failed to deliver the benefits and outcomes its supporters anticipated, prompting international discussion as to whether the promises of externally-led nation-building (as an attempt to mould rogue states in a democratic, market-friendly fashion) are outweighed by the kinds of pitfalls and perils of intervention that have come to characterise the Iraq experience. This book identifies and addresses the major issues emerging from the current debate including the evolution of external interventionism as an idea, an explanation of what went wrong in post-Saddam Iraq and why the Iraq experiment is flawed by the Bush administration's refusal to address long standing political and historical grievances among Muslims as part of the 'War on Terror'. The contributors assess the troubled relationship between Islam and the West, the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, foreign policy debates in the US, and how economics and politics are juxtaposed in a highly contentious manner in any project of externally-driven nation-building. Beyond the Iraq War brings together scholars and practitioners in an attempt to move beyond the polemical dimensions of the existing debate and provide a balanced analysis of what the Iraq enterprise can tell us about the brand of external interventionism espoused by the Bush administration and also the lessons it holds for any future interventions into the affairs of states. It combines a mix of disciplines, most notably international relations and economics as well as theory and empirical evidence. The book is written in a non-technical, but rigorous, manner in order to make complex and diverse issues accessible to the general reader This fascinating and scholarly work will appeal to academics and scholars in the fields of political economics, political science and international relations. Policymakers, journalists and media commentators will also find this work to be of great interest and value.

The critically acclaimed account of life in Iraq under US occupation with a new afterword.

In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America’s most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations. The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America’s buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America’s armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new “American way of war” as it has unfolded in Iraq.

"In this analysis, commentator Michael Schwartz demolishes the myths used to sell the U.S. public on the idea of an endless "war on terror" centered in Iraq. He shows how the U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country."--BOOK JACKET.

"The best book to have been written about the Vietnam War" (The New York Times Book Review); an instant classic straight from the front lines. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.