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Aaron Glantz

How America Lost Iraq Paperback – March 16, 2006

by Aaron Glantz (Author)

4.5 16 ratings

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A reporter for Pacifica Radio charges the Bush administration with mishandling the war in Iraq, explaining how the U.S. has compromised its early victories and goodwill among the Iraqi people with the Fallujah bombing campaign and by causing unnecessary civilian casualties through a failure to provide promised life necessities. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tarcher
Publication date

March 16, 2006
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

5.48 x 0.92 x 8.26 inches
ISBN-10

1585424870
ISBN-13

978-1585424870
See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Aaron Glantz is a reporter for Pacifica Radio and many other media outlets.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tarcher (March 16, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1585424870
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1585424870
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.48 x 0.92 x 8.26 inches

Customer Reviews:
4.5 16 ratings

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Aaron Glantz

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Aaron Glantz produces public service journalism with impact. His work has sparked more than a dozen Congressional hearings, numerous laws, and criminal probes by the DEA, FBI, Pentagon and Federal Trade Commission. A two-time Peabody Award-winner, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, multiple Emmy nominee, and winner of the Selden Ring and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, his work has appeared in New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America and the PBS NewsHour. A senior reporter at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and a recent JSK Fellow at Stanford, his books include Homewreckers, The War Come Home and How America Lost Iraq. He lives in San Francisco.

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Matthew Smith

Who knew there was a Middle?

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2007

Verified Purchase

I was more than a little leery coming into this book knowing Mr. Glantz worked for Pacifica. I was afraid I might find a one-sided diatribe about how the U.S. invasion and the government is terrible and what a horrible crime the invasion was, but what I found was a balanced look at the situation and firsthand account from some Iraqis on how the invasion and occupation have affected them.

One of the telling moments of this book for me was when Mr. Glantz talks about having problems with his editors only wanting stories that paint a certain kind of picture of the Iraqi situation. With U.S. media this is so often the problem; a story will be bent depending upon the people reporting the stories own political leanings rather than the unvarnished truth. So often the Right and Left are pulling so hard that the story, which is actually somewhere in the Middle, gets lost, and the people who end up getting hurt are the victims (Iraqis) and the people who are relying on these reports to understand the situation and make informed decisions based on this information (U.S. citizens).

Mr. Glantz chronicles the failures of this administration and military leaders to understand the peoples they came to free. As I read his interviews with everyday Iraqis a picture emerges that should have been seen early on this occupation. Iraqis were happy the Americans toppled this mostly hated regime, but this enthusiasm would only go so far. It would only last so long. As the U.S. military continued to commit excesses and as life on the ground for ordinary Iraqis either deteriorated or remained the same, as under Saddam, that patience and enthusiasm wore thin until finally it broke.

As the U.S. broke every rule of fighting a counter-insurgency in Iraq, I have to ask myself what did they expect would be the result of this policy? What did they expect Iraqis with no jobs, no money and no prospects to do?

Here in the U.S. we too often forget about those we have chosen "liberate" and only focus on ourselves. Mr. Glantz gives us an Iraqi perspective that is sorely missed in our media today. He gives us a fair portrait of life in Iraq and for that he should be thanked. It is the stories from the Middle that are the most honest and important.

3 people found this helpful

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thecrwth

Should be required reading for Bush' adminirstration

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2007

Verified Purchase

Glanz shows in a progressive manor, through Iraqi opinions how things spun out of control. He shows occurances that have been well hidden. Long before the Abu Ghraib debacle, there were injustices that lead up to copmplete frustrated as illustrated by the Iraqi opinions. He does present things as he witnesses them and tries to offer no opinion, but there are some stories that are gut wrenching, and he admits that he cried often. That is the part I liked the best.

2 people found this helpful

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V. I. Scherb

Recommended.

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2005

Aaron Glantz, a reporter for Pacifica Radio, has written a compelling first hand account of his experiences in Iraq between early 2003 and early 2005. This is new journalism at its best. Mr. Glaantz is very upfront about where he is coming from as a supporter of human rights for all, whether they be Americans, Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, or Iraqi Christians. He is quite willing to acknowledge the atrocities of Saddam's regime as well as of the terrorists and U.S. forces. Living among the Iraqi people and sometimes mistaken for one by U.S. soldiers, he brings clarity to a complex situation and puts a human face on people under enormous pressure that you won't soon forget. Glaantz's honesty comes through in a way you never see in the mainstream media, whose reporters are often isolated from the day to day lives of Iraqis in their suites at the Palestine hotel. He is also quite willing to turn his eyes on himself, asking "How many people can you interview whose relatives have been killed before you start to crack--or worse, tune it all out?"

In addition to a strong narrative arc that describes how American liberators became occupiers became oppressors, the book is filled with details and conversations that make pieces of the puzzle that is Iraq fall into place. To pick one example, his discussion of kidnappings in Iraq brings up thought-provoking points that one rarely hears voiced. Glaantz notes an Associated Press report that "80 percent of the roughly 170 foreigners kidnapped in Iraq had been peacefully released. Overall, it seemed hostages directly involved in the occupation [this would include contractors working for the military] fared much worse than their civillian counterparts" (217). Details that should be reassuring turn out to be disturbing, such as Glaantz's comment that the soccer stadium converted into a mass grave in Fallujah "turned out to be a lot smaller than I imagined it" which necessitated the bodies being buried very close together, "and each mound has a small concrete slab as a headstone, the name of the person hand-scrawled with red paint. Sometimes there are more than one name" (273).

Although he gives you his own opinions (and identifies them as such), many of the book's most powerful moments come when he gives the voices of the Iraqis scope. To take one example, a simple conversation with a shopkeeper suggests a chillingly plausible reason for the number of suicide bombers: there are people willing to pay them, rumors suggesting one might get as much as $250,000. As the shopkeeper explains, "Of course some people will take money to explode themselves . . . That way their family and and their grandchildren will be able to live well in the future." While huge sums go to military contractors and to protect oil interests, little goes to help the locals. As the shopkeeper wistfully comments, "If some of the money went to unemployed Iraqi people . . . there would be fewer bombings" (119-20). The passage is shocking, not only because it critiques U.S. policy, but because it suggests that many of the "fanatics" may not be fanatics at all, but simply people who are trying to protect and provide for their families by victimizing the families of others. Can the noblest of ends justify the worst of means? It is a question that some Iraqis answer in the affirmative, but obviously many in the U.S. answer the same question in the same way. Ultimately, this cycle of violence underlies the whole book, and it applies to both Iraqi history as well as to U.S. actions in the Middle East.

Although the book is hardly a justification of the invasion of Iraq, the book is by no means an unrelenting attack on U.S. policy. Glaantz sometimes defends U.S. actions and critiques the anti-war Left; Glaantz also describes his struggle with his editors at Pacifica who want more sensational stories than Iraqi discontent with the lack of power, water, and proper sanitation. He refuses to believe many of the worst reports of the U.S. military's behavior, although he acknowledges that a number of them turn out to be true. One of the things that makes the book remarkably compelling, is that you can actually see the shift from denial to acceptance taking place in his narrative, a shift that parallels the Iraqis transition from hope, to disappointment, to outrage. Glaantz also makes unheard of efforts (at least for a journalist these days) to talk to multiple witnesses and check out their statements when this is possible. If he doesn't see things himself, he describes the aftermath in telling detail and interviews survivors. Ulimately the story Glaantz tells is a tragic one, a story in which a bad situation is dishonestly exploited by the powerful, opportunities to do good are squandered, and arrogance and poorly thought out policy make a situation increasingly spiral out of control.

Despite the complexity of some of the issues How America Lost Iraq raises, the book benefits from being a first hand account, and thanks to Glaantz's writing skills it has considerable narrative momentum. The book thus manages to be a fast read even as it is also remarkably thought-provoking. All in all this is an excellent book that focuses on an element of the Iraq war rarely covered in the media--the Iraqis themselves.

35 people found this helpful

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