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Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco
 
 
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Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: opposition conference, interim constitution, United States, Iraqi Kurdistan, State Department (more...)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
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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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Review

"An incisive, firsthand account of policymaking in crisis." General Wesley Clark" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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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 (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #906,947 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

David L. Phillips
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
opposition conference, interim constitution
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Iraqi Kurdistan, State Department, United Nations, Saddam Hussein, Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, Middle East, Working Group, Ba'ath Party, Security Council, Future of Iraq Project, Gulf War, Colin Powell, Wilton Park, White House, Donald Rumsfeld, Arab Shi'a, Transitional Administrative Law, Defense Department, President Bush, Dick Cheney, Marc Grossman, Capitol Hill, Arab Sunnis
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Customer Reviews

15 Reviews
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3.3 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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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)   
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.
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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)   
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.
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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This is an important book, August 19, 2005
A nagging question hovers in the air over this volume, regarding Bush and the Pentagon - "How On Earth Did They Get Away With It?". Phillips gives us a seasoned expert's analysis of the complexities and hard work of nation-building, and documents the blunders and missed opportunities of an American Administration long on faith and need for control but short on fact-based analysis and thinking-in-depth. Phillips was one of the talented nation-doctors shunted to the sidelines while the barbershop crowd busied themselves with leeches and bleeding. This book will figure prominently when We The People finally do a "lessons learned" study of the Iraq adventure and what went wrong.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars In touch with Washington, out of touch with Iraq
This book is an insider's look at the building of the American occupation regime in conquered Iraq. As such it is full of detailed criticism of this process from the inside - the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by R. L. Huff

2.0 out of 5 stars I just couldn't get through this one; my apologies to the author
My apologies to the author, but I just couldn't get through this one.

The first typo I encountered was on page 24, line 30: "... Read more
Published 19 months ago by W. Wilt

2.0 out of 5 stars Mistitled- the fiasco was in pre-war planning
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1.0 out of 5 stars Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco
Losing Iraq illustrates what went wrong with planning for post-liberation Iraq although not for the reasons its author, a Council on Foreign Relations staffer, intends. Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars Enormous Incompetence!
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2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing
It seems many reviews discuss this book through the prism of their politics, as opposed to reviewing it _as a book_.

As a book, I was quite disappointed. Read more
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5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth about Iraq
This book is very well written, by a highly respected author and former Bush administration official, who has been in Iraq and witnessed the fiasco firsthand. Read more
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Did you know that there was a plan for occupying Iraq? This plan was hatched in 1998. But President Bush ignored it because the neocon cabal told him to. Read more
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