Review Khidhir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda, Scribner, 2000

  

Before the 2003 invasion Khidhir Hamza was one of the leading Iraqis in America warning of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and advocating for war. He regularly appeared in the media. In 2001 he told PBS’s Frontline that Iraq only needed a nuclear core to build an atomic bomb. In 2002 he gave a presentation to the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He told the latter that Iraq had enough uranium to build three bombs by 2005 if it was enriched. At the end of that year his claims were used in a speech by President George Bush as part of the public relations campaign to win support for the invasion. His story was first published in 2000 in Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda. He turned out to be a fraud.

Review George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA, Harper Collins, 2007

  

George Tenet was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Presidents Clinton and Bush. He eventually resigned because of the controversy over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. His book At The Center of the Storm is very interesting because it shows that he was very sensitive about his time at the Agency with several chapters responding to criticisms of his tenure.

Review Hourly History, The Iraq War, A History from Beginning to End, 2023

  

Looking at The Iraq War, A History from Beginning to End one would think it was for children’s because it is only about half the size of a regular book. That would be a mistake. While it is printed on small paper and is very short at less than 100 pages it turns out to be a thorough review of the Iraq War from the Clinton to the Biden administrations with some good analysis.

Review Edited by Paul Cornish, The Conflict In Iraq, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

  

The Conflict In Iraq is an anthology with chapters by various authors connected to the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London. Like any collection some of the chapters are quite good and others are not. The fact that the book was put together very early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq also makes some of the readings outdated. Still there are some important insights provided such as comparisons between the British and Americans times in Iraq, the war planning, and United Nations weapons inspections.

Review Samuel Helfont, The Iraq Wars, A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2025

  

Samuel Helfont released his third book on Iraq entitled The Iraq Wars, A Very Short Introduction. It is a brief review of U.S.-Iraq relations from the 1990s to the 2014 war versus the Islamic State. He provides some new and interesting insights on how Iraq became a focus of American foreign policy.

Review Lloyd Gardner, The Long Road To Baghdad, A History Of U.S. Foreign Policy From The 1970s To The Present, The New Press, 2008

 

Rutgers University Professor Lloyd Gardner attempted to explain the larger ideas behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq in The Long Road To Baghdad, A History Of U.S. Foreign Policy From The 1970s To The Present. He argues that the war was the result of a change in foreign policy philosophy from the realism of the Cold War to a new idealism based upon asserting American power and spreading democracy. The problem is Gardner gets lost in the details and side stories and loses track of his argument.

Vice President Cheney’s Role In The Iraq War

 

Almost the entire senior leadership of President Bush’s national security team was for regime change in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney was out in front making accusations against Saddam Hussein to justify the invasion. Since he recently passed here is a review of his role in the lead up to the Iraq War.

Review Terry Anderson, Bush’s Wars, Oxford University Press, 2011

Anderson, Terry, Bush’s Wars, Oxford University Press, 2011

 

Bush’s Wars is an attempt to show what went wrong with President Bush’s War on Terror. Author Terry Anderson argues that the U.S. should’ve never invaded Iraq and that detracted from fighting Al Qaeda and the war in Afghanistan. He tries to put together issues that have been discussed before into one narrative but there are major problems with his history that undermines the work.

Review Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, Pantheon, 2004

Blix, Hans, Disarming Iraq, Pantheon, 2004

 

President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair justified their invasion of Iraq based upon the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. They quoted United Nations weapons inspections in the 1990s which found a vast program to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. When inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002 however their work was largely criticized by the U.S. and UK because they didn’t support those countries’ claims against Saddam. Hans Blix was a chief inspector during both regimes and wrote Disarming Iraq to express his perspective on what happened. His book is an argument for the work of the United Nations inspectors and against the actions of both Iraq and the United States.

Review James Baker III and Hamilton, Lee, The Iraq Study Group Report, The Way Forward – A New Approach, Vintage Books, 2006

Baker, James, III and Hamilton, Lee, The Iraq Study Group Report, The Way Forward – A New Approach, Vintage Books, 2006

 

By 2006 the American political establishment finally realized that things were not going right in Iraq. Violence was going up and neither the Iraqis nor the U.S. seemed like they had any answers. That led to several strategy reviews including the independent Iraq Study Group whose main findings are contained within this book. Ironically rather than coming up with a course adjustment the group actually advocated for maintaining the status quo showing that many of the elites didn’t know what the actual policy was in Iraq.

Review Richard Haass, War of Necessity, War of Choice, A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars, Simon & Schuster, 2009

Haass, Richard, War of Necessity, War of Choice, A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars, Simon & Schuster, 2009

 

Richard Haass worked in both the George H.W. Bush and the George W. Bush administrations. Originally he was in the National Security Council under National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and then went to work for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department. These positions led him to be involved in making policy over Iraq. Haass argues that the Gulf War was a necessary war to preserve America’s national interests while the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not needed.

Review Timothy Andrews Sayle, Engel, Jeffrey, Brands, Hal and Inboden, William, Edited by, The Last Card, Inside George W. Bush’s Decision To Surge In Iraq, Cornell University Press, 2019

Sayle, Timothy Andrews, Engel, Jeffrey, Brands, Hal and Inboden, William, Edited by, The Last Card, Inside George W. Bush’s Decision To Surge In Iraq, Cornell University Press, 2019

 

The Last Card, Inside George W. Bush’s Decision To Surge In Iraq provides the most comprehensive view of how the Bush administration decided to order the Surge in 2007. It consists of two halves. The first is interviews with 28 members of the White House starting with President Bush himself along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and various members of the National Security Council, State Department, and Pentagon. The second part is a series of articles by academics trying to evaluate the decision making process and giving some views of whether the Surge worked or not. It’s those firsthand accounts of most of the major players within the government that makes this a must read for those interested in the Surge.

Review Sam Faddis, The CIA War In Kurdistan, The Untold Story Of The Northern Front In The Iraq War, Casemate, 2020

Faddis, Sam, The CIA War In Kurdistan, The Untold Story Of The Northern Front In The Iraq War, Casemate, 2020

 

Sam Faddis was the head of a CIA team sent into Iraqi Kurdistan to help prepare for the 2003 invasion. His experience was a microcosm of how dysfunctional the entire U.S. effort was to depose Saddam Hussein. Both the White House and CIA headquarters had their set ideas about how the war was going to go and ignored what Faddis and his team were reporting. He believed this set the stage for the failed U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Review Adeed Dawisha, Iraq, A Political History from Independence to Occupation, Princeton University Press, 2009

Dawisha, Adeed, Iraq, A Political History from Independence to Occupation, Princeton University Press, 2009

 

Adeed Dawisha’s Iraq, A Political History from Independence to Occupation attempts to trace the history of the formation of the Iraqi state and its political system. He begins with the British Mandate when Iraq was created up until the middle of the U.S. occupation. His main theme is that Iraqi democracy has always been flawed.

Review The U.S. Army In The Iraq War Volume 2, Surge And Withdrawal 2007-2011

Rayburn, Colonel Joel, Sobchak, Colonel Frank, Editors, The U.S. Army In The Iraq War Volume 2, Surge And Withdrawal 2007-2011, Strategic Studies institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2019

 

The second volume of the U.S. Army’s official history of the Iraq War covers the Surge of 2007 to the Americans returning to Iraq after the fall of Mosul in 2014. Three things stand out. First was how dysfunctional the Bush administration was when it rolled out its new strategy in 2007. The second is the details provided on how Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hallowed out the Iraqi Security Forces so he could take control of them which helped lead to the resurgence of the insurgency. Last, it touches on how paranoid Maliki was. The sheer length of the book at over 600 pages and its density makes it one for Iraq researchers more than the general public.

US Army In The Iraq War Volume 2 Ch 2 “The Eve Of The Surge, December 2006-February 2007”

Chapter 2 of the U.S. Army’s second volume on the Iraq War covers the period after President Bush decided to surge troops into Iraq but before it was actually implemented. It showed more dysfunction within the U.S. government, while inside Iraq the warring factions were preparing for a final confrontation.

US Army In The Iraq War Volume 2 Ch 1 “Strategy In Crisis, October-December 2006

The second volume of the U.S. Army’s official history of the Iraqi War starts off with President Bush trying to come up with a new Iraq strategy. He’d been disengaged from the war and finally realized in 2006 that things were not going well. It took an extended period of time to formulate a new approach which highlighted the continued dysfunction within the White House over a conflict which was supposed to be a defining moment in the administration.

Review The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq

Coll, Steve, The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq, Penguin Press, 2024

 

Twenty years after the Iraq invasion a comprehensive book including both the US and Iraqi perspectives on what led to the conflict has finally been published. That’s thanks to Steve Coll and his The Achilles Trap, Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., And The Origins Of America’s Invasion Of Iraq. The author traces U.S.-Iraq relations from the Iran-Iraq War to the 2000s to show how the two countries constantly misread each other leading to false assumptions and the eventual overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Review Mugged By Reality, The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions

Agresto, John, Mugged By Reality, The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions, New York: Encounter Books, 2007

 

John Agresto worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority from 2003-2004 as the advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education. The book covers two themes. The main one is the author giving a neoconservative argument for why he supported the Iraq War. The second is what were the root causes for the failure of the U.S. occupation sprinkled with anecdotes about the people he met in Iraq. The book is about how the author struggled to hold onto his ideas as they were confronted by the occupation. Some of his criticisms are poignant but too many times he rambles on and contradicts himself.

Review Hope Is Not A Plan, The War In Iraq From Inside The Green Zone

Mowle, Thomas, Hope Is Not A Plan, The War In Iraq From Inside The Green Zone, Westport London: Praeger Security International, 2007

 

Hope Is Not A Plan, The War In Iraq From Inside The Green Zone is a very informative book about the lack of U.S. strategic planning and coordination from 2004-05. It’s an anthology with each chapter written by military officers who served in Iraq during that period. As the editor Thomas Mowle points out everyone should know that the Bush administration did not plan for the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion that led to looting and the collapse of the Iraqi state. What this selection tries to point out is that the Americans continued to fail at planning afterward.