Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco [Hardcover]

David L. Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2005

According to conventional wisdom, Iraq has suffered because the Bush administration had no plan for reconstruction. That’s not the case; the State Department’s Future of Iraq group planned out the situation carefully and extensively, and Middle East expert David Phillips was part of this group. White House ideologues and imprudent Pentagon officials decided simply to ignore those plans. The administration only listened to what it wanted to hear.Losing Iraq doesn’t just criticize the policies of unilateralism, preemption, and possible deception that launched the war; it documents the process of returning sovereignty to an occupied Iraq. Unique, as well, are Phillips’s personal accounts of dissension within the administration.The problems encountered in Iraq are troubling not only in themselves but also because they bode ill for other nation-building efforts in which the U.S. may become mired through this administration’s doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war. Losing Iraq looks into the future of America’s foreign policy with a clear-eyed critique of the problems that loom ahead.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an ambitious attempt to render bureaucracy dramatic, Phillips, a defecting former senior policy adviser to President Bush, sets out to describe the policy meetings, memos and internal government negotiations behind the Iraq war, and to contrast what he sees as the reality of the occupation with the stated policies of the government. During the runup to the war, Phillips nurtured an authentically diverse coalition of Iraqis and international officials to plan Iraq's economic and political reconstruction. In a text whose main character is a working group (even if it is, as its Iraqi members call it, "the Mother of All Working Groups"), Phillips documents the increasing rhetorical volume of Wolfowitz, Bremer, and Bush himself, while matter-of-factly describing what he sees as the disastrous effect of their policies on the U.S.'s effort to win the trust of Iraqis before the war. The Bush administration, he charges, not only ignored the expert advice of this group, but duplicated and undermined its efforts; Phillips found himself and his work marginalized. His account, unfortunately, is obscured by a fog of acronyms and names. What Phillips offers is more a paradigmatic account of one official group thwarted efforts than a critical analysis of large-scale shifts in power. (June)
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Review

"An incisive, firsthand account of policymaking in crisis." General Wesley Clark" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813343046
• ISBN-13: 978-0813343044
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,467,796 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Understanding Iraq is the keyword, June 11, 2005

By 

Hussain Abdul-Hussain (Washington,DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Hardcover)

To all those who have written reviews here before me: I'm criticizing this book and I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I'm a native Iraqi. David Phillips is no doubt an insider and his book unveils a lot of the confusion within the administration on how to handle Iraq. This book is good as an assessment of the performance of the administration at large. I don't believe it is good to explain the American failure in Iraq.
From an Iraqi perspective, America's endeavor in Iraq came to a bitter end not because of State and DoD rivalry. America failed because both State and DoD didn't understand Iraq's language, culture, sociology and anthropology. Failure happened because experts like Phillips analyzed and assessed the situation there from the comfort of their offices inside the beltway in Washington DC.
Before writing on Losing Iraq, try first Understanding it. Phillips's book should be put in this context. Still, the book has good information on the need to get the administration's house in order if the United States is to regain its leading role in the world, yet Losing Iraq falls shorts on debating the Iraq issue from outside American partisanship.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Case study in the triumph of uninformed dogma, June 6, 2005

By 

Donald A. Lash (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Hardcover)

I'm inclined to be generous with the stars because of the number of clearly orchestrated negative reviews, all using identical language. Nevertheless, Losing Iraq demonstrates what happens when the object of foriegn policy is considered irrelevant, and the only consideration is ideology. It becomes clear that history, national identity and circumstances were really of no interest to the neo-cons, who were anxious to use Iraq as a proving ground for their interventionist philosophy. It also shows how alienated the policy professionals have become from those who drink the administration's kool-aid.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Madness of imperialism, March 3, 2010

By 

Scholasticus (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Hardcover)

Sad but true. Entering a war with dishonorable motives (i.e., lying about WMD and then changing war goals to nation building and establishment of democracy) only gets the imperialist into more trouble. Fortunately for the US, it had enough money to get through this little bush war, but imagine what one trillion dollars could do to alleviate poverty and ignorance in America over the past eight years. The American political class has the farsightedness of a common mole. Frank Wallis explored similar themes in his _Iraq 2003: Causes and Consequences of an Imperial Expedition_ (Editions Tour Blanche, 2007). ISBN: 978-0963833211.