Amazon.com
The crowning achievement of Jimmy Carter's presidency was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and he has continued his public and private diplomacy ever since, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his decades of work for peace, human rights, and international development. He has been a tireless author since then as well, writing bestselling books on his childhood, his faith, and American history and politics, but in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he has returned to the Middle East and to the question of Israel's peace with its neighbors--in particular, how Israeli sovereignty and security can coexist permanently and peacefully with Palestinian nationhood.
It's a rare honor to ask questions of a former president, and we are grateful that President Carter was able to take the time in between his work with his wife, Rosalynn, for the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity and his many writing projects to speak with us about his hopes for the region and his thoughts on the book.
A big thank you to President Carter for granting our request for an interview.
An Interview with President Jimmy Carter
Q: What has been the importance of your own faith in your continued interest in peace in the Middle East?
A: As a Christian, I worship the Prince of Peace. One of my preeminent commitments has been to bring peace to the people who live in the Holy Land. I made my best efforts as president and still have this as a high priority.
Q: A common theme in your years of Middle East diplomacy has been that leaders on both sides have often been more open to discussion and change in private than in public. Do you think that's still the case?
A: Yes. This is why private and intense negotiations can be successful. More accurately, however, my premise has been that the general public (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) are more eager for peace than their political leaders. For instance, a recent poll done by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed that 58% of Israelis and 81% of the Palestinians favor a comprehensive settlement similar to the Roadmap for Peace or the Saudi proposal adopted by all 23 Arab nations and recently promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Tragically, there have been no substantive peace talks during the past six years.
Q: How have the war in Iraq and the increased strength of Iran (and the declarations of their leaders against Israel) changed the conditions of the Israel-Palestine question?
A: Other existing or threatened conflicts in the region greatly increase the importance of Israel's having peace agreements with its neighbors, to minimize overall Arab animosity toward both Israel and the United States and reduce the threat of a broader conflict.
Q: Your use of the term "apartheid" has been a lightning rod in the response to your book. Could you explain your choice? Were you surprised by the reaction?
A: The book is about Palestine, the occupied territories, and not about Israel. Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word. I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.
Q: You write in the book that "the peace process does not have a life of its own; it is not self-sustaining." What would you recommend that the next American president do to revive it?
A: I would not want to wait two more years. It is encouraging that President George W. Bush has announced that peace in the Holy Land will be a high priority for his administration during the next two years. On her January trip to the region, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for early U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. She has recommended the 2002 offer of the Arab nations as a foundation for peace: full recognition of Israel based on a return to its internationally recognized borders. This offer is compatible with official U.S. Government policy, previous agreements approved by Israeli governments in 1978 and 1993, and with the International Quartet's "roadmap for peace." My book proposes that, through negotiated land swaps, this "green line" border be modified to permit a substantial number of Israelis settlers to remain in Palestine. With strong U.S. pressure, backed by the U.N., Russia, and the European Community, Israelis and Palestinians would have to come to the negotiating table.
1/18/2007
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From Publishers Weekly
The term "good-faith" is almost inappropriate when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a bloody struggle interrupted every so often by negotiations that turn out to be anything but honest. Nonetheless, thirty years after his first trip to the Mideast, former President Jimmy Carter still has hope for a peaceful, comprehensive solution to the region's troubles, delivering this informed and readable chronicle as an offering to the cause. An engineer of the 1978 Camp David Accords and 2002 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter would seem to be a perfect emissary in the Middle East, an impartial and uniting diplomatic force in a fractured land. Not entirely so. Throughout his work, Carter assigns ultimate blame to Israel, arguing that the country's leadership has routinely undermined the peace process through its obstinate, aggressive and illegal occupation of territories seized in 1967. He's decidedly less critical of Arab leaders, accepting their concern for the Palestinian cause at face value, and including their anti-Israel rhetoric as a matter of course, without much in the way of counter-argument. Carter's book provides a fine overview for those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict and lays out an internationally accepted blueprint for peace.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Following his #1 New York Times bestseller, Our Endangered Values, the former president, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, offers an assessment of what must be done to bring permanent peace to Israel with dignity and justice to Palestine.
President Carter, who was able to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, has remained deeply involved in Middle East affairs since leaving the White House. He has stayed in touch with the major players from all sides in the conflict and has made numerous trips to the Holy Land, most recently as an observer in the Palestinian elections of 2005 and 2006.
In this book President Carter shares his intimate knowledge of the history of the Middle East and his personal experiences with the principal actors, and he addresses sensitive political issues many American officials avoid. Pulling no punches, Carter prescribes steps that must be taken for the two states to share the Holy Land without a system of apartheid or the constant fear of terrorism.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known, the president writes. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy, and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal of a just agreement that both sides can honor.
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is a challenging, provocative, and courageous book.
Customer Reviews:
Disappointed.......2007-10-17
Jimmy Carter is a great humanitarian, Christian and scholar, but I was so disappointed in several of his statements in this book. I am a liberal Christian like Carter, but one who knows that what is going on between Palestine and Israel is not in the least like Apartheid in South Africa. I can only continue to pray that at some point Palestine's leaders will begin to truly negotiate for peace. Palestinian extremists are doing their own people a grave disservice.
Truth telling is not popular . . ........2007-10-16
Jimmy Carter has proven to be our best ex-President, by any standards. In this book he presents his point of view on one of the thorniest issues facing the world since the the Israeli State was born. One thing to know is that Carter, though sophisticated in world events, for sure, and politics, nevertheless sees the world through his own lenses which are coated with a scratch resistant brand of Christian morality. I don't say this in a perjorative sense at all.
Taken on its merits both Carter's recounted history of the problem and attempts at its solution are well ordered and expressed, and as someone who lived in Israel for a year, I believe accurate. What is most fascinating is the reaction of those ultra-Zionists from both the Jewish and the fundamentalist Christian worlds for whom Israel cannot be criticized. The reaction is all about the use of the term apartheid.
Whatever your reaction to the use of the word or the criticism of its use, this book is a must read for anyone that wants to understand the nature of the the intractable problems there and in the Palestinian territories. However, don't think that Carter's point of view is complete. It's not complete, no, but important. I would love to hear what Carter has to say about the geopolitical influence of Western prosperity in the middle east in general, and how it affects this 50 year old problem in particular.
I wonder, as I always do, how our policies would shift if we all paid taxes in direct proportion to our wealth so that the tax burden were more fairly distributed away from the suffering middle class and toward those who benefit most from our society and polical order.
A voice for peace and hope that must not be neglected.......2007-10-15
Jimmy Carter was perhaps the must successful US president in forging a lasting peace agreement in the Middle East, the fruits of which both Israel and Egypt enjoy to this day. In this book he explores the basic requirements for a 2-state solution between Palestine and Israel, and the major obstacles in the face of such a solution. The book is largely accurate, fair, and balanced.
The book's major strengths and weaknesses stem from Carter's character: He is a diplomat and not a visionary. He talks to and acutely listens to all parties, understanding and reconciling their complex points of view rather easily. This willingness to talk to everyone is what has made him so successful in making peace. Unfortunately the book does not stray very far from the hackneyed 2-state solution. It does not even discuss the one-state solution similar to what worked well for South Africa, Bosnia, Europe, and here in the USA. I recommend you augment your reading of this book with "One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse", by Ali Abunimah, as well as the books by Mazin Qumsieh, Virginia Tilley, etc.
full of misrepresenations.......2007-10-10
this book should be labeled fiction. Jimmy has refused to debate (or even appear on the same stage) of critics who have questioned statements in the book he has presented as fact. very sad.
THE BRAVEST PRESIDENT EVER.......2007-10-10
In a country where a minimal critic against Israel would be labeled as "Anti-Semitism, " by writing this book, President Jimmy Carter shows his commitment to the principles of human rights. As usual, he is attacked by Israelis because of telling the truth.
GOD BLESS AMERICA, GOD BLESS JIMMY CARTER!
Book Description
From ABC White House correspondent Martha Raddatz, the story of a brutal forty-eight-hour firefight that conveys in harrowing detail the effects of war not just on the soldiers but also on the families waiting back at home.
In April 2004, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were on a routine patrol in Sadr City, Iraq, when they came under surprise attack. Over the course of the next forty-eight hours, 8 Americans would be killed and more than 70 wounded. Back home, as news of the attack began filtering in, the families of these same men, neighbors in Fort Hood, Texas, feared the worst. In time, some of the women in their circle would receive "the call"-the notification that a husband or brother had been killed in action. So the families banded together in anticipation of the heartbreak that was certain to come.
The firefight in Sadr City marked the beginning of the Iraqi insurgency, and Martha Raddatz has written perhaps the most riveting account of hand-to-hand combat to emerge from the war in Iraq. This intimate portrait of the close-knit community of families Stateside-the unsung heroes of the military -distinguishes The Long Road Home from other stories of modern warfare, showing the horror, terror, bravery, and fortitude not just of the soldiers who were wounded and killed but also of the wives and children whose lives now are forever changed.
Customer Reviews:
Thanks .......2007-09-29
Thank you i got the book today and have read a little bit of it .. it got here before i thought it would so thank you
Long Road Home is a quick read........2007-09-24
Martha Raddatz does a good job of making you experience an episode in Iraq from the viewpoint of the soldiers. She lets them tell the story. Perhaps it would have been good to include more of her viewpoint or some corollary material but it is fine book as it is written and portrays an important story in this horrible war.
PHENOMENAL.......2007-09-20
I don't ever write reviews on here but this is one of the best books I've ever read. Written from many different points of views between Iraq and the United States, it pulls you in and makes you want to keep reading. I have told all of my family and friends (and a few random people in the bookstore) they must read this book. it truely is phenomenal and makes me cry and support the soldiers and their families so much.
'Long Road Home' - remarkable view of War on Terror .......2007-09-03
The 'Long Road Home' captures a side to the War on Terror that Americans, or anyone for that matter, rarely glimpse.
Author and journalist Martha Raddatz takes us into the hearts and minds of some of America's sons (and their families) on one of the toughest days in modern military history. We witness a 'from top to bottom' look at how Soldiers, from the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, respond in a series of deadly desperate circumstances - outmanned, outgunned and surrounded. The day - 4 April 2004, aptly became known as Black Sunday - in Iraq.
This is one of those rare insights, through the eyes of those who fought and died ...those who fought and lived ...and those who still fight each day with their demons. Martha Raddatz honored the Soldiers and families of the 1st Cavalry in this deeply moving record of what happened one day in April 2004.
Clearly, she takes the story telling to a higher plain. She's not one to embrace low-hanging fruit of political ax-grinding and blame-game antics. She keeps faith, in writing this book, with the valor of the Soldiers and families she introduces to us.
A harrowing war story, it is also filled with indelible marks of hope, conviction, compassion, determination and courage. Our family was deeply and forever affected by the events of this day of days. 'The Long Road Homes' signature is the telling of many Soldier's experiences - among them, my own son, Corporal Loren Haller.
Simply excellent.......2007-08-24
This is a wonderfully written and compelling book about a fierce battle in Sadr City, Iraq. One of the best war-time books I've ever read.
Average customer rating:
- Great photography book
- not a copiest
- The size of this book!
- A Celebration of Ugly and I Don't Care
- Well ... is exactly like the title says ...
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A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005
Manufacturer: Random House
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Binding: Hardcover
 Leibovitz, Annie
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ASIN: 0375505091
Release Date: 2006-10-03 |
Book Description
“I don’t have two lives,” Annie Leibovitz writes in the Introduction to this collection of her work from 1990—2005. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Portraits of well-known figures–Johnny Cash, Nicole Kidman, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet–appear alongside pictures of Leibovitz’s family and friends, reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early Nineties, and landscapes made even more indelible through Leibovitz’s discerning eye. The images form a narrative rich in contrasts and continuities: The photographer has a long relationship that ends with illness and death. She chronicles the celebrations and heartbreaks of her large and robust family. She has children of her own. All the while she is working, and the public work resonates with the themes of her life.
Customer Reviews:
Great photography book.......2007-09-17
I've been wanting this book for a while and to have found it here for under $75 I was excited and bought it immediately. A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 by Annie Leibovitz mixes photos of famous faces and intimate photos of her family, close friends and a few landscapes. I really enjoyed all of the photos. The book is so big I have yet to get through the whole thing! It was well worth the money I am defiantly now a fan of Leibovitz.
not a copiest.......2007-09-14
Great artists are inspired by others and yes, one can see other photographer's work in Annie's. I consider her one of the greats, right up there with Irving Penn, Avedon, Mapplethorpe and found the text very interesting. This book is a bargain considering the depth of information and production quality.
The size of this book!.......2007-09-10
I was surprised at the size of this book! It is much thicker and larger than what I thought and I think it is good value for money. It provides the reader with an insight into the photographer's life and gives the book a very intimate feel. Not all the pictures are flattering to Ms Leibovitz and her relatives and seeing these ordinary photos of people not looking at their best makes you feel as if you are looking at people that you also know. An interesting mix of photos of celebrities and everyday people is presented.
One point of critisizm - why do they print a good photo over two pages and then cut it in half by the page break? A good picture deserves to be printed on one page so as to see it as a whole.
A Celebration of Ugly and I Don't Care.......2007-09-01
This book is perfect for today's society and culture.
Page after page I couldn't help thinking that Ms. Liebowitz was getting back at everyone because God made her so unattractive. It seems it runs in the family -- the photo of her sisters would frighten a scarecrow. Her parents look like fools, the photos of Sontag are disrespectful, and even Brad Pitt is at his worst. Ugly, ugly, ugly...
Yes the world is cruel and not everyone nor everything can be beautiful... it is merely that this book is blatantly defensive.
Well ... is exactly like the title says ..........2007-08-26
... no more no less.
Do not expect to see more than an "allowed invasion" on her life in B&W.
Self promotion, just it. But who didn't, right?
If you can take some lessons "through her personal eyes", good for you.
I believe from everything you can take something good.
Amazon.com
Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. --Tom Nissley
Making a Fiasco
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. And he took the time to answer a few questions about Fiasco:
Amazon.com: As military correspondent for the Post, you have made five trips to Iraq over the last four years. How has it changed over that time?
Thomas E. Ricks: It has been markedly worse each time, in terms of security. On my first trip, in April-May 2003, we would walk out on the streets of Baghdad at night, albeit with caution. Even on my second trip, in the summer of 2003, I would feel comfortable hopping in a car and driving 100 miles north from Baghdad to Tikrit. To do either of those things now would be suicidal. In January and February of this year, Baghdad felt worse to me Mogadishu did when I was there in 1993 or Sarajevo did when I was there a few years later. It appeared to me that there was no security, except what you provided for yourself with armed men and careful planning. One Army major described the city to me as being in "the pure Hobbesian state" in which everybody is fighting everybody.
By the way, contrary to what I see asserted occasionally, most reporters don't live in the Green Zone, the walled-off area in central Baghdad that is the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Reporters live out in the city, and I think generally have a better feel for what is going on than do people living in the Zone or on big American military bases. In the area of Baghdad I stayed in, I constantly heard gunfire and explosions. Yet an American colonel told me that my neighborhood was deemed "secure." I think that really meant that U.S. troops could drive through it while heavily armed--say, with a .50 caliber machine gun atop a Humvee--and usually not be attacked.
I worry that what the Americans measure are threats to U.S. troops and the killings of Iraqis. That neglects a huge spectrum of other significant activities--rapes, robberies, kidnappings, acts of extortion, and, most importantly, acts of violent intimidation.
Amazon.com: You cite many strategic errors in the planning and execution of the war, but perhaps the central one is that the U.S. military leadership failed to recognize that they were fighting an insurgency, and their methods of fighting in fact helped to create that insurgency. Can you explain those methods, and their effects?
Ricks: The U.S. military that went into Iraq in 2003 was the best military in the world for fighting another military. But it was woefully unprepared for the task at hand. For example, U.S. military culture believes in bringing overwhelming force to bear. Yet classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for using only the minimal amount of force necessary to get the job done. U.S. soldiers and their commanders, untrained and unschooled in the difficult art of counterinsurgency, tended to improvise. So in the summer of 2003, some soldiers in Baghdad decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry--and they sometimes did this by threatening to shoot the children of looters, and even conducting mock executions.
More broadly, the Army in the fall of 2003 fell back on what it knew how to do, which was conduct large-scale "cordon-and-sweep" operations. These missions scarfed up thousands of Iraqis, most of them fence-sitting neutrals, and detained them. U.S. military intelligence officials later concluded that 85% of those detained were of no intelligence value. The detention experience frequently was humiliating for Iraqis, a violation of another key counterinsurgency principle: Treat your prisoners well. (Your readers who want to know more about this should read a terrific little book by David Galula titled Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.)
Not every unit was ineffective or counterproductive. I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year.
Amazon.com: But today's military leadership was formed in Vietnam, when all of those lessons of counterinsurgency were supposedly learned before. Why didn't that experience translate into a preparation for the current conflict?
Ricks: Military experts, such at Andrew Krepinevich (The Army and Vietnam) and Lt. Col. John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) say that after that war ended, the Army washed its hands of the entire experience and essentially concluded that it was never going to do anything like that again. It was almost as if the very word "counterinsurgency" was banned from official Army discourse.
In Iraq, there was a tiny minority of American soldiers early on who understood how to win the occupation. These generally were civil affairs officers and other Special Forces types. But their wisdom often was disregarded. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war being fought conventionally," one Special Forces lieutenant colonel glumly commented one day in Baghdad.
Amazon.com: You've been writing about the military for the Post and the Wall Street Journal for years now, and Fiasco is built from the testimony of a remarkable array of sources up and down the chain of command, some off the record but many more on the record. Can you talk about your sources? Is this level of public criticism of a war from within the military precedented??
Ricks: Yeah, reporting the book was a pretty emotional experience. Even having covered this war as it unfolded, I was taken aback by the rage that some officers felt toward the Bush Administration, and especially toward Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And also toward Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the no. 2 guy at the Pentagon. I think the rage is probably like what the military felt about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. What is unprecedented, I think, is that many officers had doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, especially in the way we did it.
The emotions also hit me pretty hard at times, especially when I was writing my chapter 13, about how widespread abuse was by American soldiers in 2003-04, often because they hadn't been trained for the mission they faced. I have spent more than 15 years covering the military. I tend to like and admire these people. So when I learned about a 4th Infantry Division soldier shooting an unarmed, handcuffed Iraqi detainee in the stomach, and the investigating MPs saying the soldier should be charged with homicide, and instead the commander simply discharged the soldier from the Army--well, that bothered me.
Another thing that struck me with sources was the mountain of information that was available. I read over 30,000 pages of documents for this book. At the end of one interview a guy gave me a CD-ROM with every e-mail he had sent to Ambassador Bremer, who ran the civilian end of the first year of the occupation. Other people showed me diaries, unit logs, official briefings, and such. Also the ACLU did a great job of obtaining and releasing piles of official U.S. military documents related to abuse--so I could see the time stamp on an e-mail in which an intelligence officer stated that "the gloves are coming off" in interrogations, and one soldier recommended blows to the chest while another wrote back recommending low-level electrocution.
Unfortunately the Army wouldn't release the details of citations for valorous acts by soldiers, which means that the Pentagon made it easier for me to learn about the sins of soldiers than about their acts of bravery. The Marine Corps did give me those "narratives" that support the bestowing of medals, which I really appreciated. Those documents really brought home to me the fierceness of the two Battles of Fallujah, in April and November 2004--probably the toughest fighting American troops have seen since Hue and Khe Sanh in the Vietnam War.
Amazon.com: In the last section of the book, you project a variety of possible scenarios for the next 10 years in the Middle East, mostly grim ones, and just in the past two weeks the sudden violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is leading to talk of a wider regional conflict. Where do you think those events are leading us?
Ricks: We are really in unexplored territory. We are carrying out the first-ever U.S. occupation of an Arab nation. This is also almost the first time we have engaged in sustained combat ground war with an all-volunteer force. (I think the suppression of the Philippines insurrection might count as a small precedent.)
Even more significantly, I think the Bush Administration doesn't really like "stability" in the Middle East. In its view, "stability" has been the goal of previous administrations, but pursuing it led to 9/11. It is not the goal, it is the target. So they are for rolling the dice, both in Iraq and in Lebanon. I think the big worry is those wars spilling over borders. Fasten your seat belts.
Book Description
The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on the unprecedented candor of key participants.
The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.
As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated.
There are a number of heroes in Fiasco-inspiring leaders from the highest levels of the Army and Marine hierarchies to the men and women whose skill and bravery led to battlefield success in towns from Fallujah to Tall Afar-but again and again, strategic incoherence rendered tactical success meaningless. There was never any question that the U.S. military would topple Saddam Hussein, but as Fiasco shows there was also never any real thought about what would come next. This blindness has ensured the Iraq war a place in history as nothing less than a fiasco. Fair, vivid, and devastating, Fiasco is a book whose tragic verdict feels definitive.
Customer Reviews:
Ricks tells it from the inside........2007-10-10
Author Thomas Ricks finds the key players, in Washington and in Iraq, and allows them to have their say. By their own words, Bush, cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell, and others in the hierarchy indict themselves for their poorly conceived warmaking. Catching them in the field and post-retirement, Ricks faithfully reports the disappointment and outrage of those who knew from the beginning what Bush and crew refused to recognize; that to counter an insurrection you engage the population rather than abuse them. Ricks refrains from personally accusing anyone. By their actions and words, our megalomaniacal fools for leaders make it unnecessary.
Fiasco - "All Over Again".......2007-10-09
Fiasco is an outstanding account of our excursion into Iraq. It should be required reading for every politician and military officer.
We seem to repeat our history as opposed to learning from our mistakes. How much of our youth and treasure are we willing to sacrifice for a misguided and misdirected war?
David W. Blackmon, Ph.D.
Hartsville, SC
Good outline on what's going on in Iraq today.......2007-10-02
Thomas Rick's book _Fiasco_ moves the reader through the whole history of the US war in Iraq, starting from the first Gulf War in 1991 until about the middle of 2006. The book does a decent job of documenting what happened, although the intelligence blunders (WMD? Where?) that got us into Iraq in the first place are glossed over a bit. Once in Iraq, military tactical mistakes, clashes between the military and the "Coalition Provisional Authority", and a general lack of understanding/respect for Iraqi culture contributed to the seemingly intractable mess that the US is in today.
We find out who was really pushing for this war (not so much Bush and Cheney, at least in the early days of their Administration, but folks like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Chalabi). Again, its not made clear what motivated Bush and Cheney (other than a reference to Cheney's heart condition). The role of Congress, and the formation of the "Coalition of the Willing" is also kind of rushed through.
There is good detail about the Abu Ghraib prison, though. (A little graphic, as is some of the other sections about the roadside bombs)
While not perfect, I recommend this book for anyone who wants to go beyond the TV news and talk radio, and start to gain a deeper understanding about Iraq and the US presence there.
war mismanagement.......2007-09-27
excellent book on the details of the mismanagement of the iraq invasion by all elements of american authority: white house, military, state department and others. no preparation for the reality of fact on the ground, no proper reaction to failed plans with new tatics or mission, continuation of deliusional mission of forcing "democracy" on folks whose religion abhors that notion, failure to seal the borders, decision to fight another limited war thus dooming our brave soldiers to a slug out urban war without end. book is an eye opener and all congressmen should be made to read it. the april,2007, update on surge effects is timely.
Brings it all together.......2007-09-22
We have been hearing bits and pieces about the problems with the Iraq war since it started and they were shocking enough. In Fiasco, everything is laid out in chilling detail. The most frightening thing is that, but for indifference and/or stupidity again and again, it could have turned out very differently. The depth of detail in this book is truly amazing but it is not a boring read.
Book Description
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.
The Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America—a half-dozen bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women showed up in hot pants, a movie theater that screened shoot-’em-up films, an all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sold pornographic movies, a parking lot filled with shiny new SUVs, and a snappy dry-cleaning service—much of it run by Halliburton. Most Iraqis were barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone during the occupation, from the imperial viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of twentysomethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country.
In the vacuum of postwar planning, Bremer ignores what Iraqis tell him they want or need and instead pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions—a flat tax, a sell-off of Iraqi government assets, and an end to food rationing. His underlings spend their days drawing up pie-in-the-sky policies, among them a new traffic code and a law protecting microchip designs, instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity production. His almost comic initiatives anger the locals and help fuel the insurgency.
Chandrasekaran details Bernard Kerik’s ludicrous attempt to train the Iraqi police and brings to light lesser known but typical travesties: the case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran; Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe v. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer’s ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.
This is a startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government’s folly in Iraq played out. It is a book certain to be talked about for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
Arrogance is not Wise.......2007-10-17
This book is quite well written, and shows the folly of arrogantly trying to rebuild Iraq after the war without having done the necessary homework on that country and with very selfish and dubious motives on the part of the Bush Administration. Nicely written book, informative and objective to the last page.
An outstanding book about the incompetence we have shown in Iraq.......2007-10-11
Any book has bias and I do not doubt that Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a journalist for the Washington Post, saw some things in Iraq in a bias way. Still, this book is a MUST read for anyone to better understand just where we went wrong in Iraq. At times, I felt I was reading a PJ O'Rourke or Carl Hiaasen book about government bureaucrats ruining yet another program. At other times, I just shook my head in disbelief and some of the arrogance and absurdity of the people put in positions of power in Baghdad. As I read the book I realized that it is no wonder that the Iraqi people are tired of us.
The author points out that many Americans were put in positions of power and authority with no real expertise or understanding of Iraqi culture or Islamic culture. Resumes from neoconservatives were all that was needed to head up programs so loyalty meant everything. The drawback, of course, was that people with no real idea of what the heck they were doing ended up bungling up everything they touched.
This book reminds me that our nation needs to stop and think of what our role is supposed to be. George Marshall, creator of the genius Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, is spinning around in his grave right now as the incompetence in Iraq makes me wonder what happened to real leaders in our nation. Bremer? Rumsfeld? Cheney? Clueless. This book points that out with the evidence and it's a chilling reality of the mistakes we are making on an hourly basis in that nation.
Pretty close to the truth...sorry to say.......2007-10-09
I was working at the CPA during the time the author covers in his book. I think I may have been at some of the meetings he describes. He captures the sense of the CPA, a bunch of well-intentioned, hard-working people without much of a clue about how to run an occupation in an Arab country. These were heady times and we believed we were birthing a new democracy. Few of us were equipped to pull it off and the split between DoD and the rest of the US and coalition governments doomed us from the start.
I was there!.......2007-10-06
I did a tour at the American Embassy in 2006, after the events recorded in "Imperial Life." It was fun being able to read about details of the Republican Palace, then go to that particular feature and see it for myself. More importantly, I could put what I read into context, both in the Embassy and in Iraq itself. Even though the CPA no longer occupies the Green Zone, the isolation of the military and state department staff from events occurring around us was similar to what happened to the CPA in "Imperial Life." Most staff (military included) rarely leave the the Green Zone making the average non-Iraqi resident unaware of what goes on beyond the walls. If you want to understand what living in the Green Zone is like, and why progress is slow in Iraq read this book.
Timely information.......2007-09-23
"Imperial Life" is honest, first hand, information. The author has a good grasp of the subject, of the surroundings and above all, of reality. He is able to pick up the essentials and deal with them without exaggerating his importance or his role. He is a well informed man, as he should be. The book is very well put together, and a pleasure to read. It is above all, timely. This means, regretably, that its importance shall pass, as the events he decribe will give in time place to "new improved" versions. The importance for historians to come and to serious readers will not be diminished.
Average customer rating:
- An outstanding vision of the sad reality of this world.
- Amazingly tragic and beautifully awful
- A look at the true horrors of this world!
- Amazing!! Print Quality.
- Um relato dantesco e honesto da nossa época
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Inferno
James Nachtwey
Manufacturer: Phaidon Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0714838152 |
Amazon.com
Though he is probably the world's most honored recent war photographer, James Nachtwey calls himself an "antiwar photographer," as the preeminent critic Luc Sante notes in his excellent foreword to Inferno, a landmark collection of 382 war-crime photos. Nachtwey has taken shrapnel and had his hair literally parted by a bullet, but he's never lost his compassionate outrage. The stunning images in this huge-format book--brutally abused Romanian orphans, Rwandan genocide victims, a rat-hunter family of Indian Untouchables barbecuing dinner, skeletal dehydration victims in Sudan, the miserable in Bosnia, Chechnya, Zaire, Somalia, and Kosovo--are excruciating to look at, yet impossible to tear your eyes away from. Nachtwey's art is meant to force us to face unbearable facts. Faces are the key: you can't gaze into the eyes of a Romanian toddler tied to a bed, or wired to a primitive "electromagnetic therapy" device, and not grasp the horror more fully than you would by watching a TV news item or reading a newspaper piece. (The book's text explains each photo's context.)
Inferno is also a masterpiece in strictly aesthetic terms. The power of Nachtwey's images transcends journalism. Bloody handprints on a living-room wall in Kosovo, the ghostly imprint of a Serb victim's vanished body on a floor, a Hutu with crazed eyes displaying the machete gashes he received for opposing the Tutsis' butchery, a howling orphan in a crib, one eye contracted in anger--these are compositions that depend, like Goya's, on the artist's skill as much as the subject's legitimate claim on our conscience.
Nachtwey's photographs make us capable of imagining that it could have happened to us. They are hard to forget, or forgive. --Tim Appelo
Book Description
Though he is probably the world's most honored recent war photographer, James Nachtwey calls himself an "antiwar photographer," as the preeminent critic Luc Sante notes in his excellent foreword to Inferno, a landmark collection of 382 war-crime photos. Nachtwey has taken shrapnel and had his hair literally parted by a bullet, but he's never lost his compassionate outrage. The stunning images in this huge-format book--brutally abused Romanian orphans, Rwandan genocide victims, a rat-hunter family of Indian Untouchables barbecuing dinner, skeletal dehydration victims in Sudan, the miserable in Bosnia, Chechnya, Zaire, Somalia, and Kosovo--are excruciating to look at, yet impossible to tear your eyes away from. Nachtwey's art is meant to force us to face unbearable facts. Faces are the key: you can't gaze into the eyes of a Romanian toddler tied to a bed, or wired to a primitive "electromagnetic therapy" device, and not grasp the horror more fully than you would by watching a TV news item or reading a newspaper piece. (The book's text explains each photo's context.)Inferno is also a masterpiece in strictly aesthetic terms. The power of Nachtwey's images transcends journalism. Bloody handprints on a living-room wall in Kosovo, the ghostly imprint of a Serb victim's vanished body on a floor, a Hutu with crazed eyes displaying the machete gashes he received for opposing the Tutsis' butchery, a howling orphan in a crib, one eye contracted in anger--these are compositions that depend, like Goya's, on the artist's skill as much as the subject's legitimate claim on our conscience. Nachtwey's photographs make us capable of imagining that it could have happened to us. They are hard to forget, or forgive. --Tim Appelo
Customer Reviews:
An outstanding vision of the sad reality of this world........2007-08-23
This book is not made to be placed in every hands. But everyone old enough to face the sad reality and the ugly side of the human kind should have a look at it.
Amazingly tragic and beautifully awful.......2007-08-19
I have owned this book for roughly four years now and somehow manage to revisit it at least twice a year. The images are hauntingly beautiful. Nachtwey has a real gift for photography, for capturing that perfect image, with the perfect contrast, stark, naked and vivid. I feel as if I have been not merely an onlooker of these devastatingly breathtaking images, but as though I have been there.
Inferno was the first exposure to Nachtwey I had had, and it certainly has not been the last. His work is amazing.
A look at the true horrors of this world!.......2007-08-03
Awesome, shocking, disturbing, eye opening, these just begin to describe the feelings and emotions of this book. The photographs of mans inhumanity to his fellow man go beyond those images we see on the nightly news. James Nachtwey shows us the world of war, famine and poverty. It is eye opening. For anyone who collects books of photography, this is a must, but, it is not a coffee table book. This is one that you keep in reserve for those days when you think your life if bad or tough. Take it down from the shelf, open it and realize just how hard it could be!.
Amazing!! Print Quality........2007-05-14
What can i say.
It's just wonderful print quality most of Photobook which i bouht.
and Large photo is good too.
Um relato dantesco e honesto da nossa época.......2007-05-11
Uma obra obrigatória para quem acompanha o melhor do fotojornalismo nos últimos 50 anos. Um relato duro, profundo e honesto dos horrores criados pelo homem: Romênia, Somália, Índia, Sudão, Bósnia, Ruanda, Zaire, Chechênia e Kosovo.
Ressalte-se a força extrema das composições de James Nachtwey, valorizadas pela encadernação primorosa em capa dura e pelas grandes ampliações em PB.
Um livro forte, mas profundamente necessário para quem quer reconhecer o lado menos poético do nosso tempo.
Book Description
Revised every three years, the National Electric Code is the most widely used and accepted criteria for all electrical installations. It is adopted as law by most states, cities, and municipalities. Containing the up-to-the-minute facts and safety guidelines electricians need to avoid costly errors, the NEC remains a "must-have" reference for anyone involved in electrical design installation, identification, and/or inspection. Features: -reorganized and completely redesigned to be more user friendly than past versions -the single most important document in the electrical industry -contains the legal rules that must be followed for all electrical installations -a must-have reference for anyone involved in electrical design, installation, and
inspection
Customer Reviews:
The book cost to much.......1999-10-01
The book cost to much but you got to have it
Not a training manual.......1999-09-24
In all states that I have held an electrician's license (20 years), it was mandatory to pass an electrical exam based on the current NEC. This is an invaluable resource and a must have if you are an electrician. But it is not a training manual. Homeowners and do-it-yourselfers are best served picking up a how to electrical book based on the current National Electrical Code. There are several here at Amazon.
New code book not ready for prime time.......1999-09-10
Here's a book that begs the question, "What were these guys thinking?" At NFPA, it seems the voltage is on but nobody's home. The new large format doesn't make the book any easier to interpret or information easier to find, perpetually sore subjects among users of past code books. The text might be larger, which is fine for us aging boomers with reading deficiencies, but that's not a good enough reason to radically alter a long-established format. Further, it seems NFPA intended this edition for office use, not field use. Those of us who carry the books in our trucks have ready-made spots for the old 5x7.5 editions. This big book is klutzy and subject to vastly more damage in everyday use.
And finally there's the price of this "deluxe" edition. The 1978 code book was $8, the 1996 book was about $35. There is simply no justification for the 1999 book, a virtual requirement for every informed electrician, to be scraping the $50 level. Will somebody please check the NFPA's grounding?
1999 NEC a more readable safety standard.......1999-03-05
The National Electrical Code (NEC)is published every 3 years by the National Fire Protection Association. It is offered as the minimum safety standard for electrical installations, but is not a law until adopted by the respective state or municipal governing body. The 1999 NEC has undergone some major revisions since the 1996 edition in order to improve the readability and understandability of a document which is not written in lay-mans terms. The NEC states that it does not intend to provide a design specification nor an instruction manual for the untrained. This re-write has been successful in helping to clarify and improve many areas, particular Article 250 on Grounding. Many exceptions have been removed from the 1996 version and re-written into a "positive" text in the 1999 edition, helping to reduce some of the confusion. The larger format of the 1999 NEC makes it easier reading, and makes the tables much more usable.
Certainly, additional study and supplemental references are essential in order to fully comprehend the meaning of the NEC and the intended application in our every day wiring installations. As a certified electrical instructor and licensed electrial inspector, I use the NEC every day and have found that the 1999 edition is an improvement over the 1996 edition.
I need the Massachusetts Electrical Code.......1999-02-04
Dear Amazon, nice to see you carry this all important book, but as a Massachusetts Electrician it is useless to me. We are required to follow the NEC with the Massachusetts supplement. That would be nice to see on your list.
Book Description
525i, 530i, 535i, 540i, including Touring
The BMW 5 Series (E34) Service Manual: 1989-1995 is a comprehensive, single source of service information and specifications available specifically for BMW 5 Series from 1989 to 1995. The aim throughout this manual has been simplicity, clarity and completeness, with practical explanations, step-by-step procedures and accurate specifications. Whether you're a professional or a do-it-yourself BMW owner, this manual will help you understand, care for and repair your E34 5 Series.
Though the do-it-yourself BMW owner will find this manual indispensable as a source of detailed maintenance and repair information, the BMW owner who has no intention of working on his or her car will find that reading and owning this manual will make it possible to discuss repairs more intelligently with a professional technician.
Models and engines covered:
525i (M20 with DME 1.3) 1989-1990
525i (M50 with DME 3.1) 1991-1992
525i (M50TU/VANOS with DME 3.3.1) 1993-1995
530i (M60 with DME 3.3) 1994-1995
535i (M30 with DME 1.3) 1989-1993
540i (M60 with DME 3.3) 1994-1995
Transmissions covered:
Manual (remove, install, external service)
Getrag 260/5 and 260/6
Getrag S5D 250G
Getrag S6S 560G
Automatic (remove, install, external service)
ZF 4HP22/EH
A4S 310R (THM-R1)
ZF A5S 310Z
ZF A5S 560Z
Technical highlights:
* Maintenance procedures from brake fluid changes to resetting the Service Indicator. This manual tells you what to do, how and when to do it, and why it's important.
* Engine and cylinder head service, repair and reconditioning, including M50 and M60 timing chain setup and adjustment.
* Extensive engine management information for specific BMW 5-Series driveability problems, including reading Check Engine light fault codes.
* Transmission maintenance, troubleshooting, adjustment and repair, including hydraulic clutch, gearshift linkage, and driveshaft.
* Body adjustments and repairs, including sedan sunroof removal and adjustment.
* Heating and air conditioning repair, including A/C micro-filter and A/C component replacement.
* Wiring schematics for all circuits, including power distribution, grounds, and component locations.
* Comprehensive BMW factory tolerances, wear limits, adjustments, and tightening torques that you've come to expect from Bentley manuals.
Customer Reviews:
worth it.......2007-05-15
I always buy the shop manual for the cars that i have. this one is very good and at a good price
excellent service manual.......2005-09-23
Bentley did it again.. As a avid fix it guy, I find this book very helpful in situation where you want to fix simple things and or understand how the component works.. Simply go to the index and look for the part and there you go.... info at the palm of your hands.. This book gives all the info you need to start fixing your 5 series. I myself have a 1990 525i and this book help me fix some of the things that requires step-by-step guidance. I recommened this book for fixit yourself car guys out there.
Jeff
Great Book.......2005-09-18
If you do your own mechanic work, this book is a must. We needed to replace the heater blower fan motor and couldn't even find it. This book answered all our questions and provided step-by-step instructions for the work. Originally we thought the price was a bit high compared to books available from parts stores, but after glancing through it realized this book is worth every penny. Thank you Book Rack for making this title available.
Wery helpful manual.......2005-09-09
I can strongly recomend this produkt to other BMW owners, it is wery detailed and covers most of the isues that a good mecanical manual shood have.
5-Series Service Manual.......2005-09-09
I must say that although it took longer than was expected to arrive, once I received the manual, it was worth the wait.
This book covers everything one would need to know about items that either the novice (like myself) or mechanic would like to fix.
The pictures, the expanations are done extremely well, and I have followed them and fixed items that I thought were going to cost me and arm and a leg at BMW......
Get this book if you have any mechanical ability and prepare yourself for saving money!!!!
PS: Some of the things I have fixed myself are ones that my dealership said would have to be replaced, wrong..... the only thing that had to be replaced were bulbs at a cost of less than $3.00, instead of the entire module costing $250.00.
Book Description
In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war.
The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart’s year. As a participant, he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, this book amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.
Customer Reviews:
Important read for understanding the reality of Iraq today.......2007-10-06
If you feel it is important to understand what is happening in Iraq today, this book needs to be added to your reading list. The author's perspective, that of largely unempowered administrator of a province in Iraq, is both valuable and unique. Rather than the purely political or military viewpoint, you are given a look into the reality of the daily challenges being faced by those charged with trying to make things work on the ground... the implementers, not the policy makers or military men. The view is not a very pleasant or hopeful one.
The style of writing is sometimes dry and some may find it rather boring to read often repetitive accounts of setting up and administering programs, and dealing with constant political infighting among the factions. It can also be frustrating and tedious to read about hard working, well-intentioned people trying to accomplish things against great odds, only to see everything go for naught (again and again and again). But for me at least, it was the information and insights that were buried within the mundane details of Mr. Stewart's day to day accounts, and the reasons for the many failures that were the most revealing and added most to my understanding of what we are up against in Iraq.
My conclusion after reading the book was that the quote from Milton, "It is better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven," seems to perfectly sum up the attitude of the leaders of the various factions there. Until that attitude changes, the hope for a functioning democracy in Iraq appears to be mostly wishful thinking at best.
WHERE HAVE AL THE QAEDA GONE?.......2007-08-28
In the absence of an index, I can't easily verify whether Al Qaeda get only one solitary mention (and that as just one of a list of suspects) in all the 400-odd pages of this book. They are conspicuous by their absence throughout, and that strikes me as being one of the most significant aspects of the story. To this day I am hearing about the need to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and to this day I am puzzled as to what makes that so important. If we want to find their local operatives who actually plan the bombings in America and Europe we ought to be searching in Europe; and if we want to find their main leadership we should look in Afghanistan or Pakistan. However if the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq is as insignificant as it might seem from Stewart's narrative then it adds to the sense of confusion regarding the coalition's objectives.
Stewart served for a year as Deputy Governorate Coordinator in two provinces, often being left in effective charge. He was no more than a freelance contractor, but his previous experience ensured that his job-application was gratefully snapped up by HM Foreign Office, doubtless short of volunteers from within its own ranks. He restricts his narrative to what he saw at first-hand. He took up his post in a genuine attempt to make the ostensible coalition objective of a democratic and peaceful Iraq work, and he does not analyse or evaluate that and the other supposed objectives. However his direct involvement included reporting periodically to Bremer in Baghdad, and anyone able to put 2 and 2 together in such a manner as to make 4 and not 22 can easily read between the lines. Imagine the following pronouncement from the colonel in charge of strategic planning, for instance. 'What we are hoping to do is to lay out some philosophical underpinnings of a plan...to begin a journey of discovery for building a more cohesive implementation of plans and policies in the five core areas.' A fine time to be getting round to that in April 2004, Stewart seems to say. Elsewhere he notes Bremer's MBA from Harvard and it's not hard to read into what he says his exasperation at the know-all fatuity of Bremer's 7-point plans for privatisation and such like and at the ghastly gobbledegook ('best practice gaps analysis' etc) in which language seems to function not as a vehicle for thought but as a substitute for thought.
Back at the ranch Stewart was having to confront the realities of the situation. There were, he says and I believe him, some genuine successes before and independent of Gen Petraeus. The trouble was -- few if any Iraqis believed in the successes; or if they did it was not for long. Any seeds of improvement the coalition was sowing had roots too shallow to have much hope of permanence. Stewart's own despairing conclusion comes in his last sentence - however bad the native Iraqi movers and shakers might be, local loyalties always revert to one or other of these, and foreign-imposed improvements, some of them real others just speculative and hopeful, do not stand a chance in this culture. He was trying to make order out of chaos, but they preferred the chaos. He was trying to win hearts and minds, but the minds never stayed with him for long because the various men of power and influence had their own fluid and shifting agendas and alliances, and whether anyone's heart was ever with him is anyone's guess.
It stands to elementary reason that Stewart was in no way opposed to the occupation of Iraq. He went there at all because he believed that some good could come of it. As I read his account, he sees no prospect of success for it now, although he is not explicit about whether a totally different approach might have fared better. He was battling with bureaucracy, incompetence, ignorance, infighting, grandstanding and pretence from Bremer's outfit in Baghdad, opposition to his own role from his own coalition military let alone from the populace he was trying to help, and near-ludicrous ineptitude from the Italian component of such military day in and day out. He was improvising most of the time, and while he has no illusions that his snap decisions were always or even mainly right, the real truth of the matter seems to me to have been that in most cases he didn't rightly know whether he had been right or wrong, because there was no real criterion for judging of that.
The book has been put together from such notes as the author managed to take and retain, but in conditions of such pressure some of the material depends on his memory. I have no reason to suppose that any of these are unreliable, and mental honesty is shiningly apparent throughout, not least in his candour about the minor lies he felt he had better tell from time to time. Whether his own bravery was apparent to him I can't tell, but it's apparent to me. There is much quiet tongue-in-cheek humour, and the tongue comes right out of the cheek in his account of the exploits of the Italians, who were, in the homely Lancashire phrase, as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition. His particular angle on the events is one that we don't often see recorded, let alone recorded as well as this. It does not purport to give the wider picture, but he is free of the temptation to blow his own trumpet, and I expect future historians will derive more solid benefit from Stewart than from, say, the memoirs of Gen Franks. He stayed his year's course, he had nothing more to stay for, and he leaves me wondering what the rest of them, even the admirable Gen Petraeus, can possibly hope to achieve. There were successes before and independent of him, they put down no roots, and it looks as if lasting successes will require divine intervention rather than human generalship.
What a wonderful story.......2007-07-06
Rory Stewart is a gifted story teller. I started this book one morning to "check it out" and had a hard time putting it down. His recollections of his year in Iraq, from August 2003 to June 2004 are some of the most non-partisan, honest and heart-wretching stories I've yet to read on this war. His youthful naivete, his non-military outtakes on Iraq in parts make his story all the more readable as it could have been told by any outsider looking in.
He doesn't put the blame on one person, but on everyone, from the US, British, Italian military and the Iraqis themselves. (Although I had a feeling the British forces in Nasiriyah were disgusted with the Italians in their area...) He doesn't boast about his accomplishments like a former military officer would, and he does mention his own faults at not being aggressive enough with some local sheikhs. But it's all obvious that dealing with tribal warfare takes more than blunt negotiations or quick reaction forces. What the Coalition failed to do from the beginning was win the "hearts and minds of the Iraqis."
A civil war was looming already in 2003, with the Sadrists and Badr gang finger-pointed as the big evil doers. Three, four years later nothing much has changed in that respect.
From dealing with corrupt sheikhs, police chiefs and huligans in the streets, Rory had to get reconstruction project started and kept getting held back by dissatisfied locals wanting their share of the corrupt pie. Rory also gave out praise for some people he met then who are big players today: Generals Petraeus and Odierno.
This book is an honest portrayal of life in a war zone. From sudden, incoming mortar rounds to kidnappings and gunshots found on corpses later on. Rory held back his emotions when recalling his story, which makes this so much more interesting than the many other books that want to blame the war's failures on just Bush, the military generals, or the Iraqis. This book is not about who is to blame, but rather why success as westerners see is so hard to come by in this part of the world.
Rory shows that the Iraqi culture is not an easy culture to live with. Its people are friends one minute, and deadly archrivals the next when it comes to tribal mentality and its focus on revenge. His stories make one realize why success in Iraq for the Coalition will come slowly and at a great cost.
The easy-to-follow verbage, the laymen's terms of military tactics and the in-your-face descriptions of daily events make this book a must-read for anyone interested in Today's Iraq. This book should be translated into Arabic so that the Iraqis can read about themselves and how juvenile they come across to all non-Iraqis.
I am definitely going to keep my eyes open for any more works by Rory Stewart.
An Insightful Account of the Futile Quest for Democracy in Iraq.......2007-07-01
Rory Stewart, a 30-year old British diplomat, pulls no punches in this fascinating account of futility in south-eastern Iraq. Despite the best-laid plans of mice and men (Rory is definitely in the later category), the avarice, cunning, deceit, and outright skullduggery of the typical Iraqi leader (at least in Amara) threatens to undo every good thing that Stewart and the Coalition attempt to do in Iraq. Small wonder - a people that have been repressed for over half a century are suddenly encouraged to vote, demonstrate, choose their own police chief, etc. Rory shows quite clearly why democracy is both impossible and alive and well in post-invasion Iraq. Impossible because the CPA envisions "democracy" as a pro-Western government, while Iraqis clearly don't want women to be seen or heard (Sadrists murder a quiet but educated doctor in the streets), nor are they willing to accept the leadership of anyone not from their own tribe or clan. And yet democracy is clearly thriving as long pent-up emotions, leadership, and social norms well to the surface as every group tries to get their leader in power in order to collect the perquisites of office. In the last chapters, Rory makes a nice indictment of the utter incompetence and cowardice of the Italian military contingent that took more than 7 hours to react to Sadr mortaring as well as failure to do anything as snipers closed in on the CPA compond. With friends like these...
Stewart starts out believing in the basic good of all mankind, but after being labeled "Hitler", mortared by politicians that he helped earn a voice at the table, deserted by the same leaders that he helped install, etc. he comes to the realization that the liberal perspective just doesn't work.
Although not necessarily an indictment of the invasion of Iraq, Stewart points out the incredible challenges of putting a broken society back together after war, in particular when one culture (Western) intends to pose its values on another (Iraqi). The real winner in all this - Iran.
Upbeat and hopeless about Iraq.......2007-06-27
I love this book! If there's any book that seductively explains why our adventure in Iraq is mostly doomed, it's this one. Rory Stewart writes so well, with spot-on black, observational humor about his experiences as part of the coalition government's effort in a remote part of Iraq. It's funny, but in that rueful way that nudges the reader to understand that the issues in Iraq have much to do with us and the other outsiders, but even more to do with longstanding cutlrual rifts and rivalries. The problems were tehre before us and will remain long after we are gone. Maybe every american taxpayer could have a copy of this book?
Customer Reviews:
Gorgeous Book.......2006-10-02
I picked up this book years ago when it came out. Outstanding photographs throughout. Since then I married and moved a lot of my books into an office. I recently rearranged my office and found the Leibovitz book and looked through it again. I still am impressed with the images even after about 5 years of not viewing them. Really a time capsule of collected photos.
This is an excellent book and I would encourage you to get a copy if you have any interest in photography, pop culture or simply beautiful images.
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