New Book - Losing Iraq

David L. Phillips
Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco
Basic Books, 2005, 956.704 PHI

Like the fighting itself, the battle over the best way bring lasting peace to Iraq continues to rage. George W. Bush has created even more controversy recently by going against the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group Report, and committing a further 20,000 troops as part of a new Iraq strategy.

Middle East expert David Phillips was part of the State Department's Future of Iraq group which planned out the plan for the reconstruction of Iraq in great detail, and is therefore in anexcellentt position to explore how the disregard of this planning has lead to the failures of reconstruction up to now. Losing Iraq doesn't just criticize the policies of unilateralism, preemption, and possible deception that launched the war; it documents the process of returning sovereignty to an occupied Iraq.

The problems encountered in Iraq are troubling not only in themselves but also because they bode ill for other nation-building efforts in which the United States may become mired through this administration's doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war. Losing Iraq looks into the future of America's foreign policy with a clear-eyed critique of the problems that loom ahead.

Read a general analysis of the current post Iraq war literature by Mark Leonard in Prospect Magazine.
Read a short analysis of the effort to reconstruct Iraq by K M Pollack, Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.