I just finished Aaron Glantz’s How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz’s editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz’s account suggests is that – contrary to my prejudices – the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah…. What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.
From Publisher’s Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors’ expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn’t tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.