World Famous Comics: No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos
No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos
By: Charles Ferguson Publisher: PublicAffairs Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: PublicAffairs Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 672 Publication Date: February 04, 2008
The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, No End In Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness, and venality.
Culled from over 200 hours of footage collected for the film, the book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials, Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. Together, these voices reveal the principal errors of U.S. policy that largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today—and what we could and should do about them now.
No End In Sight marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad's Green Zone to understand for themselves the disintegration of Iraq— and how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.
LONG. Read it? Skim it? No subject index. From a practical standpoint: this fat book, which consists of excerpts from interviews, may invite reading or skimming by the dedicated citizen. It does not, however, invite consultation about specific subjects of interest, because it has only an index of names, and no subject index. That's just plain third rate, and difficult to justify. Maybe it was infected by the movie-making process -- hey! movies don't have indexes! -- but the world of non-fiction books expects subject indexes, for good reason.
The best Charles Ferguson's update of his superb film on the Bush war in Iraq captures the problems of the current White House to a tee. Ferguson gives over his book to interviews with top players and it works perfectly. Let them talk and you know the score. This is a terrific book and I recommend it highly.
Devastating expose of war's incompetence This was an enjoyable and informative read. Ferguson avoids preaching to the reader; he lets the interviews speak for themselves. All of the incompetence of the occupation comes out in the book. He interviews top officials, not just low-level sniping critics. This book succeeds marvelously. Pick this up ASAP for the good of your country.
An Interesting and Informative Summary of Indictable Incompetence! Interviews from those involved document why we didn't start planning for the occupation until two months before the invasion - and then excluded those who know the most, why we stood by and watched extensive looting, why we naively believed that an expatriate would be quickly accepted as the new leader of a fractured country, why we disbanded the Iraq Army - despite numerous warnings not to do so, why reconstruction monies disappeared by the billions, and why our troops were poorly equipped.
Bottom Line: How many lives were needlessly lost by these mistakes that should have been avoided?
or the decline and fall of the US Empire This is heartbreaking on more fronts than you can readily imagine. If you want to know why the US election in 2008 matters so much around the world, read this book. In unblinking and unbiased assessment, Ferguson details not just the imperial hubris but the brute ignorance of a samll group of capitalist exploiters looking to make one more killing on the backs of those not among the ruling class in America. Instead of Caligula, there is Cheney, and his puppet boy President, whose track record in business and government is that he absolutely ruined financially every organization he was part of because he refused to listen to people who knew better, be it oil, baseball, the state of Texas, the US federal government... Barbara Bodine, on the ground immediately after the fall of the Hussein government and in cahrge of getting the city of Baghdad up and running, put it best: "There were 2 or 3 ways to get it (reconstruction) right and 500 or more to get it wrong, and we got all (500) of them." As a consequence, the designed incompetence that has functioned as a smoke screen for Cheney and his corporate buddies put consecutive bumblers and enablers in a volatile situation and they successfully made absoluetly everything worse: Wolfowicz, Bremer and on to Petraeus. It is a gallery of very bad actors exploiting a disaster with the mentality that it's all going to hell in a hangbasket, so let's grab what we can. The interviews speak for themselves. Rumsfeld refused to speak or comment. The White House could care less. The US is now 1 trillion in the whole and counting, and the sad prospect comes across with blunt and dismaying clarity in the final section of the book. A bloodbath seems ineveitable, unless a military coup, i.e. a controlled bloodbath, is effected by the Sunni military and their foreign backers (but not the US). Short of that, a series of civil wars destabilizing the economic tipping point of the rest of the planet has been unleashed and is all but inevitable. Cheney, Bush, and their cadre will effect what the criminals of other wars never managed - they'll get away with it. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, it is abundantly clear that an immediate pullout is impossible. No matter who wins the general election, the prospect of staying another 100 years, as McCain suggests, is possible and would in much shorter time ruin what is left of the US. The electorate in the US thinks that withdrawal has something to do with bringing soldiers home. Instead, as this book spells out quite intensely, it has to do with just how precariously interconnected the entire globe has become. Whether extrication is possible without intense disaster remians to be seen. If you saw the film, that tells only part of the story. This book will keep you up awake the rest of your life, tossed between extraordinary anger at the exploiters and certain dismay for the generations which follow and will pay the price, one way or another, for the evil done.
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