The End of Iraq How American Incompetence Created a War Without End

Galbraith, Peter

ISBN 10: 0743294238 / ISBN 13: 9780743294232

Published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006

About this Item

Text is clean & unmarked, binding is tight, unclipped dustjacket. . . B&W Photographs. Large 8vo 9" - 10" tall. 260 pp.

Seller Inventory # 20950

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The End of Iraq How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743294238
• ISBN 13: 9780743294232
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition Thus. First Printing.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Politics
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

A former member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee documents what he believes to be the failed American war in Iraq, detailing how the country has split into a Kurdish independent state, strict Islamic regions, and a chaotic Sunni area.

Reviews

Starred Review. Galbraith, a leading commentator on Iraq thanks to his recent articles in the New York Review of Books, presents a clear-eyed and persuasive case against the Bush administration's nation-building project there. As a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in Iraq, he offers an insider's view of the American occupation's failures—the poor preparation for post-invasion chaos, the cluelessness about Iraqi politics, the incompetence and corruption of the occupation authority—while advancing a deeper critique. With Saddam's dictatorship and the Baathist party and army that supported it gone, he contends that Iraq is irrevocably splitting into a pro-American Kurdistan in the north, a pro-Iranian Shiite south and an ungovernable Sunni center. America "cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war," he insists. Deeply skeptical of attempts to reunify the Iraqi state, he proposes that the U.S. withdraw from Arab Iraq and "facilitate an amicable divorce" between the fractious sections. Galbraith advised the Iraqi Kurds during recent constitutional negotiations and is palpably sympathetic to their national aspirations; his argument sometimes feels like a brief for Kurdish separatism. Still, Galbraith's authoritative grasp of the issues and his cogent, forthright call for disengagement ensure that the book will move into the center of the debate over American policy in Iraq. (July 17)
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