Can someone recommend a critical book with analysis on the iraq war?

Similar questions: recommend critical book analysis iraq war.

Here are a couple, plus a request for some more recommendations I just finished reading "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone", by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It was a very interesting account of the Coalitiion Provisional Authority and some of the earliest decisions made in Iraq. It isn’t a deep analysis; more a story of the people who were there, what they encountered, and how poorly they were prepared.

Bob Woodward’s series is supposed to be interesting, though the first two books are primarily positive. You may want to read "State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III", by Bob Woodward. I also read Fiasco: "The American Military Adventure in Iraq", by Thomas Ricks.

This more about the failure to recognize the insurgency and deal with it effectively. Fascinating reading. I’m hoping someone else will recommend another book about the CPA and the early days in Iraq; especially the infighting between the State Deparment and the Pentagon, and the details about how decisions like deBathification and pushes for privatization of government companies were made.

How the resulting troubles were poorly dealt with is interesting, but how they were caused in the first place is of much more interest to me, perhaps because it’s gotten very little coverage in the press even now. Chandrasekaran’s book offers glimpses of these details; certainly enough to understand how terribly unprepared and unrealistic the administration was in going in there. However, it is mostly an outsider’s report with some inside information from mid to high level CPA officials who were totally lost.

Hopefully someone can recommend a book with more inside information about the personalities involved at the top (Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. ) and how they led to the state we’re in now. I want to know more about this, but reading these books is not always a pleasant experience.It's like looking at a train wreck, seeing the incredibly stupid things that led up to it, and wanting to hold someone accountable. Enlightening, but incredibly frustrating.

Jpr's Recommendations Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone Amazon List Price: $25.95 Used from: $12.99 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 69 reviews) State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III Amazon List Price: $30.00 Used from: $7.69 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 269 reviews) Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq Amazon List Price: $27.95 Used from: $13.99 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 238 reviews) .

A good source for military analysis Fighting for Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq, by John R. Ballard, Praeger Security International, 2006 .

My suggestion 'Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq '. A best seller on Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon (Author), Bernard E.

Trainor (Author). Price from Amazon.com : $17.61 (141 used & new available from $4.85)Hardcover: 640 pagesReview of the books from NYTimes'Cobra II,' by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E.

TrainorThe Rumsfeld Doctrine Review by JACOB HEILBRUNNPublished: April 30, 2006MICHAEL R. GORDON and Bernard E. Trainor's book about the invasion of Iraq, "Cobra II," is everything that the Bush administration's plan for the war was not.It is meticulously organized, shuns bluff and bombast for lapidary statements, and is largely impervious to attack.

Like their widely acclaimed book about the first gulf war, "The Generals' War," published in 1995, it is based on stupendous research. Once again, the authors seem to have been everywhere and talked to everybody.No Pentagon source appears to have been too minor to track down, no plan too recondite to assess, no military acronym too obscure to explain. Gordon, a longtime military correspondent for The New York Times who was embedded with Lt.

Gen. David McKiernan's Coalition Forces Land Component Command, and Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and former correspondent for The Times, have produced another must-read. But there the similarities between the two books end.

"The Generals' War" appeared at the apogee of American power. Gordon and Trainor's sequel, by contrast, chronicles the crimes, follies and misfortunes of the second gulf war until the summer of 2003. By minutely recounting the tensions between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the military in the run-up to the war and during it, the authors seek to explain how Iraq, which was supposed to be the birthplace of the democratic crusade, has become its graveyard.

Whether their explanation is completely satisfying is another matter.As Gordon and Trainor observe, the Bush administration's decision to launch a pre-emptive invasion amounted to a wholesale repudiation of the so-called Powell doctrine, which insisted on patiently assembling overwhelming force before entering any foreign conflict. This was not academic hairsplitting, but a fundamental rift in the Republican Party. Colin Powell's credo was a lineal descendant of the Weinberger doctrine, announced by his mentor, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, in 1984 to justify bolting from Lebanon after the suicide bombing of a Marine barracks — a strategic humiliation that many Republican hawks view as the origin of America's current woes in the war on terror, since it helped convince Osama bin Laden, among others, that the United States was a cowardly weakling that would flee when hit hard.

After Sept. 11, President Bush wanted to turn the tables on America's enemies by going on the offensive. As Bush had indicated in a major campaign speech delivered at the Citadel military academy in 1999, he wished to create a more mobile and lethal force that wouldn't take the six months to assemble that his father's gulf war had required.It was an early sign, missed by most, that Bush already had Saddam Hussein on his mind.

As soon as Rumsfeld became defense secretary, he began to carry out Bush's mandate by waging a war on what he saw as an evil empire of hidebound Pentagon bureaucrats wedded to massive force. Gordon and Trainor don't give Rumsfeld much credit, but he was right about the problem. He went about solving it, however, in the most obtuse and ham-handed fashion.

Gordon and Trainor offer the fullest depiction yet of Rumsfeld's obsession with using Iraq to show that a Slim-Fast military, equipped with the latest technological gizmos, could defeat a foe overnight. Again and again, Rumsfeld pooh-poohed concerns about the hazards of an eventual occupation as preposterous. Nation-building was sissy stuff, dating to what he saw as the Clinton administration's needlessly protracted and costly deployment of troops in the Balkans.

In contrast, Iraq, an oil-rich country, would be a snap to get back on its feet, even easier than Afghanistan. "With Iraq," Rumsfeld announced publicly on Feb.14, 2003, "there has been time to prepare." Yet Rumsfeld seems to have viewed preparations for the aftermath as themselves a sign of defeatism.

Gordon and Trainor inform us that the commander of the Great Lakes and Ohio Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, who was deputed in December 2002 to come up with a plan for a postwar civilian administration, didn't receive his own budget and was forced to head to "a trade fair at the base to scrounge up office supplies. He went from booth to booth, appropriating pads, pens and staplers — not an auspicious start for an organization charged with smoothing the path to a new Iraq."Nor does Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion, come off well.

No doubt there are always tensions in wartime between a commander and his generals, but Gordon and Trainor draw on the observations of Franks's subordinates to telling effect. Enraged that the Marines weren't moving more quickly to destroy Iraqi divisions toward the end of March 2003, Franks acted as though he were in charge of a bunch of modern-day McClellans. At one meeting, Franks declared that he didn't want to hear about casualties, the authors report, "even though no one had mentioned any.

At that point, he put his hand to his mouth and made a yawning motion, as if to suggest that some casualties were not of major consequence to the attack."The book is most riveting in its descriptions of the war. Gordon and Trainor emphasize that from the outset, it went very differently than the administration had expected. They might have been slightly more forgiving on this front, since the fog — or, in the Iraqi case, sandstorm — of war wreaks havoc on most battle plans.(Given that Gordon himself wrote two articles with Judith Miller about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that The Times later criticized in a note "from the editors," he should have been more circumspect about reproving the administration for bungling the W.M.D. issue.) Still, Rumsfeld's blithe assumptions, coupled with misleading C.I.A. intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and the prospects for an insurgency, were fateful.

The authors emphasize that in late March 2003 commanders wanted to go after the Fedayeen irregulars who would form the core of the insurgency, but Rumsfeld wanted to wind the war up as soon as possible and hand Bush a gift-wrapped victory. General Franks even declared that it was as important to take risks on the way out of Iraq as it was going in by slashing troop numbers, which Jay Garner, the first head of reconstruction, thought "was plain crazy."Though Gordon and Trainor provide an excellent account of the war, their quest for detail at times threatens to overwhelm the narrative. They don't really capture the broader political context in which Rumsfeld and company were operating.

President Bush is pretty much missing in action. Dick Cheney makes a few cameos. But with an administration where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, Gordon and Trainor's focus on the military bureaucracy results in a somewhat constricted portrait of what actually took place.

Indeed, Gordon and Trainor's book suggests a conclusion they don't draw: the initial impulse for war may have had little to do with Iraq itself. Like the Western votaries of Communism in the 30's, who projected their various fantasies about utopia onto Spain or the Soviet Union, administration officials seem to have viewed Iraq as a kind of abstract proving ground for their pet theories about warfare, terrorism or democratization. They saw the Iraq they wanted to see.

Their delusions bring to mind the British historian A.J.P. Taylor's observation that the dangerous thing isn't when statesmen cannot live up to their principles.It's when they can. Link :http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30heilbrun.html?ex=1304049600&en=ffc80747ae84f966&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Sources: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375422625/stoft-20 .

Woodward, Bob Bob Woodward's "Bush At War" 'trilogy' might be what you're looking for: TeeSeeJay's Recommendations Bush at War Amazon List Price: $28.00 Used from: $0.01 Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 220 reviews) Plan of Attack Amazon List Price: $14.00 Used from: $2.99 Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 252 reviews) State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III Amazon List Price: $30.00 Used from: $7.81 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 269 reviews) .

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks Thomas Ricks spent five tours in Iraq during the war, reporting for the Washington Post and researching and writing Fiasco. Like many of the officers he most admires, when he wanted to understand what was happening as American troops encountered stronger and longer-lived resistance to the occupation than expected, he turned to recent and classic accounts of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines through the lessons of Vietnam, and he reports on his favorites for us in his list of the 10 books for understanding Iraq that aren't about Iraq.

You can also get a glimpse into his writing process with a much different list he has prepared for us: the music he listened to while writing and researching the book, from Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell to Ryan Adams and Josh Ritter. Sources: http://www.amazon.com/Fiasco-American-Military-Adventure-Iraq/dp/159420103X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3472674-9210527?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173363828&sr=8-1 .

I know bush started it but why. " "Is it hypocritical for Feminist to oppose the Iraq war?

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.