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.
