Chaos in the Green Zone : My Time As an Iraq War Strategist

An American officer offers an explosive memoir from inside coalition headquarters in Baghdad. With raw honesty and exhilarating detail, Tom Mowle shares how policy and strategy were built at a time when it still felt like the US could win the Iraq War.

When Tom Mowle volunteered to go to Iraq in 2004 to help shape American strategy, he left behind a comfortable life as a noncombat junior officer and a professor at the US Air Force Academy. In Chaos in the Green Zone, he relives the chaos and absurdity of war in a way that recalls Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch-22.

Mowle vividly depicts the frenetic cycle of activity at a wartime forward headquarters, where the enemy often dictated the schedule of events, fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. Important tasks were set aside for urgent distractions; hard deadlines constrained critical thinking and well-balanced decisions. Frequent indirect fire attacks, the deaths of colleagues, heat-induced illnesses, and personality conflicts thickened the fog of war.

Amid this chaos in an unfamiliar land, Tom wrestled with deeply human issues, including his troubled marriage, his daughter’s health, and his own career prospects. Through it all, he sought to find meaning through service despite creeping skepticism about the mission at hand.

Chaos in the Green Zone provides keen insights about Iraqi political dynamics and shows how collective ignorance, toxic optimism, and partisan considerations affected coalition decision making. The result was twenty years of dysfunctional Iraqi politics, increased Iranian influence in the Middle East, and many unnecessary Iraqi and American deaths.

This honest memoir, drawn from his original wartime diaries and other materials, is as thrilling as it is insightful. It is a must-read for anyone wanting to see what it was like to serve as a high-level strategist in Iraq and for anyone wondering how we wound up where we are today.

Tom Mowle is the author of Allies at Odds? The United States and the European Union, the editor of Hope is Not a Plan: The War in Iraq from Inside the Green Zone, and the coauthor of The Unipolar World: An Unbalanced Future. He is the owner of Rampart Professional Solutions, a manuscript coaching and editing service in Colorado.

John Nagl is a retired US Army officer who served in tank units in both Iraq wars. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife and helped write The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.