The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Hardcover)

by Ali A. Allawi (Author)
Key Phrases: transitional government, multinational force, public distribution system, Sunni Arabs, Ayad Allawi, Mahdi Army (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Allawi, until recently a senior minister in the Iraqi government, provides an insider's account of the nascent Iraqi government following the American invasion. His scholarly yet immensely readable exposition of Iraqi society and politics will likely become the standard reference on post-9/11 Iraq. It convincingly blasts the Coalition Provisional Authority for failing to understand the simmering sectarian animosity and conflicting loyalties that led Iraq into chaos. Beginning during Saddam's reign, among the motley gang of liberal democrats, Islamists and Kurdish nationalists that formed the opposition-in-exile, of which Allawi was a prominent member, he chronicles the fortunes and aspirations of the political parties, personalities and interest groups that now are tearing Iraq apart. In one representative episode, after the siege of Fallujah in 2004, the Marines initiated an ill-fated attempt to create a Fallujah Brigade of local men who would be loyal to the CPA. "[Head of the CPA L. Paul] Bremer... learned about it from newspaper reports.... The defense minister [Allawi himself] went on television, denouncing the Fallujah Brigade.... The 'Fallujah Brigade,' after a few weeks of apparent cooperation with the Marines, began to act as the core of a national liberation army. Any pretense that they were rooting out insurgents was dropped." (Apr. 9)
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

It was almost four years ago that L. Paul Bremer made a decision that may have doomed U.S. attempts to create a new Iraq: The American proconsul issued his infamous order banning many mid-level members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from working for Iraq's largest and most coveted employer, its government. In the following months, the Sunnis who had dominated the old ruling elite argued that postwar national reconciliation depended on modifying the decree. Meanwhile, leaders of Iraq's once-oppressed Shiite majority insisted on keeping the policy intact. In recent months, desperate to promote peace among Sunnis and Shiites, the Bush administration has reentered the fray, calling for Iraq's Shiite-led government to allow more ex-Baathists to return to their old jobs.

In all of the back-and-forth, nobody of any stature has suggested that Bremer's approach toward the Baathists was too soft. But now, in a compelling, detailed history of the occupation, Iraq's first postwar civilian defense minister makes just that argument. In the first major account from an Iraqi insider, Ali A. Allawi contends in The Occupation of Iraq that one of Washington's principal mistakes was that Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority did not go far enough in dismantling the Baathist structure of Iraq's bureaucracy.

"The CPA did not demolish the state that it had inherited and then start to rebuild it along the lines that it prescribed," Allawi writes. "The unwillingness to treat the Ba'ath legacy for what it was -- a totalitarian state with a privileged elite -- and therefore in need of a radical overhaul, made the CPA reforms essentially tentative and nominal. It was as if a huge, decrepit building had been struck unevenly by a demolition ball that succeeded in inflicting only minor damage to the edifice."

Saying that Bremer didn't go far enough is a striking and controversial argument. Allawi -- a former banker who left Iraq to study at MIT in 1964, lived in exile until 2003, and later served as the country's postwar finance minister -- maintains that Bremer's "blunderbuss approach" to de-Baathification was too focused on high-ranking officials; Allawi laments that Bremer's occupation government did not do enough to root out Baathists and their network of sympathizers from important mid-level positions in the government. Allawi's hard-line views on de-Baathification aren't shared by many of the Americans who have been involved in crafting Iraq policy. There's a growing consensus, even at the White House, that Bremer's policy needlessly alienated anxious Sunnis and helped fuel the insurgency.

But Allawi, a secular Shiite who still advises Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has a real-world basis for his argument: He ran three different Iraqi ministries, where he encountered firsthand the dysfunction of the country's corrupt, lazy and nepotistic bureaucracy. Although Bremer's CPA has been knocked for focusing on minutiae -- rewriting Iraq's traffic law and tax code, for instance -- instead of more quickly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqis, Allawi wishes the Americans had tinkered with more, not less. It wasn't just de-Baathification that he thinks was too timid; he contends that the CPA should have overhauled state-owned businesses by pushing for more free-market reforms. It is understandable that former exiles such as Allawi would seek an even more aggressive overhaul of Iraq's government, but it's difficult to imagine that many Iraqis who stayed put during the Baath tyranny would have tolerated an American occupation that sought to do so.

Indeed, Allawi's lament is shared by many former Iraqi exiles who returned to their country after Hussein's fall, dreaming of modernizing their homeland and sharing all they had gleaned in their years overseas. But the Iraq they encountered was very different from the one they left: It was decrepit and dangerous, riven by ethnic and religious tension. In the end, Allawi is just as critical of his fellow Iraqis as he is of the Americans. It is his countrymen, he concludes, who have failed to put aside their sect and work for the common good.

Thankfully, Allawi's book is not simply a polemic. It is a thorough account of the effort to govern and reconstruct Iraq as told by an Iraqi who was deeply involved in the process. Though dense at points, The Occupation of Iraq is packed with fascinating details for those who have closely followed America's misadventure in Iraq, and it's a valuable primer for those who haven't. His insider account of the past four years -- and his views of what the United States should have done differently -- adds a valuable new voice to the ongoing debate about Iraq.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (April 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300110154
• ISBN-13: 978-0300110159
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #407,755 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant insiders account, April 15, 2007

By	Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is the most thorough and fair account to date of the struggles in post war Iraq between 2003 and present. It documents the personalities, failures and political parties that have developed in the last few years. Large on the list are the major American mistakes following the liberation of Baghdad in 2003. This included the firing of the Iraqi army which caused 200,000 Sunnis with military training to have no jobs and thus boosted the insurgency. Another foul up was the lack of planning for the disintegration of the country into religious and ethnic factions and the lack fo planning for the way in which to deal with the large state monopolies.

A brilliant book, this exposes the ethnic tension and the rise of al-Sadr and Al-Queida. It has an insiders perspective and a true understanding of much of what is wrong with Iraq and the prospects for peace in the country. An immensely important and thorough and fair book.

Seth J. Frantzman

95 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Monumental Work - The Definite History of the whole Iraq tragedy., April 8, 2007

By	James J. Varela (Sarasota, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book will be read by scholars of the Bush administration's Iraq disaster as the definite history of the Iraq tragedy. The pages of this book will make every American regardless of political affiliation angry and at the same time sad & disgusted that the whole Iraq tragedy from pre-invasion intelligence to post war occupation could have been handled so amateurishly by the greatest military and economic power in the world. This book is a testament to what happens when politicians pursuing a political agenda push aside the military men and try and take control of a war. Although the Bush administration must bear the blame for their own blunders, Iraqi's too must bear their share of the blame. The Bush administration handed them a priceless gift in 2003. Saddam Hussein was demonic dictator; a revolution to remove him could have killed many more than have died in the current war, Iraqi's could have made Saddam's removal at the hands of the coalition forces and with the ensuing high oil prices, their gain and Iraq could be thriving today. Arabs love to talk of Arab unity in the face of Israeli agression & in the name of Islamic brotherhood but Instead power hungry Shia clerics led Al-Sadr and his ilk & thirsty for revenge X members of Saddam's secret police have turned Iraq into a battlefield & made a mockery of so called Islamic unity leaving ordinary Iraqi's of all faiths stuck in the middle, most of whom are tired and exhausted and simply wish to live in peace. The author seems to have a good blueprint for peace but at the root of the problem are the radical Shiites and the x Baathists.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black and White Strategy, May 17, 2007

By	Retired Reader (Maryland) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

At the end of World War I, the UK and France divided up the Ottoman Empire between them with out much regard for the peoples who actually lived in the Empire. Iraq was born of this ill-informed and arbitrary division as a British protectorate. From its birth to the present, Iraq was never a viable nation state such as Iran or Egypt. It was and is more an assemblage of tribes and religious factions who happen to live in a geo-political region called `Iraq'.

In this excellent book, Ali A. Allawi, an Iraqi Shia, provides first of all a clear and concise summary of religious-political factions among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish populations living in Iraq. He also discusses the equally important issue of tribal affiliation among these populations. As might be imagined, Iraq is a very complicated place and this book is complicated as well. Allawi provides the reader with three very useful readers' guides that greatly help following his multiple stories as they unfold: a list of the names of the key players; a list of acronyms; and a glossary of transliterated Arabic terms used in this book.

The core of the book is the story of the failure of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its head, Ambassador Paul Bremer, to rebuild Iraq as a viable nation with a free market economy, established democratic institutions, and the rule of law. Part of the problem facing the CPA was that the reconstruction strategy developed by the Pentagon was based on virtually no understanding of the geographical entity called Iraq but was informed by ludicrously optimistic beliefs that the various Iraqi peoples would view the U.S. as liberators, were anxious to embrace U.S. style democracy, and were ready to leap into the Global economy. Allawi wisely lets the comments of the principal architects of this strategy speak for themselves. He makes clear however that Ambassador Bremer and his CPA staff bought into that strategy in its entirety. In the end the CPA proved completely inept at executing this strategy and managing the various Iraqi reconstruction programs they did attempt to implement. Worse for its entire existence, the CPA proved incapable of understanding the complexities that formed the reality of Iraq and evidenced no interest in learning anything about the `real' Iraq. In what could be the summary of the Pentagon strategy failure in Iraq, Allawi notes that "'nuanced' thinking" was a "term of opprobrium" among senior U.S. policy makers. This inability to conceptualize a complex and often contradictory reality precipitated the invasion of Iraq and produced the failed reconstruction policies that followed.