Product Description

The End of Iraq -- definitive, tough-minded, clear-eyed, describes America's failed strategy toward that country.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21406 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-12
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Galbraith, a leading commentator on Iraq thanks to his recent articles in the New York Review of Books, presents a clear-eyed and persuasive case against the Bush administration's nation-building project there. As a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in Iraq, he offers an insider's view of the American occupation's failures—the poor preparation for post-invasion chaos, the cluelessness about Iraqi politics, the incompetence and corruption of the occupation authority—while advancing a deeper critique. With Saddam's dictatorship and the Baathist party and army that supported it gone, he contends that Iraq is irrevocably splitting into a pro-American Kurdistan in the north, a pro-Iranian Shiite south and an ungovernable Sunni center. America "cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war," he insists. Deeply skeptical of attempts to reunify the Iraqi state, he proposes that the U.S. withdraw from Arab Iraq and "facilitate an amicable divorce" between the fractious sections. Galbraith advised the Iraqi Kurds during recent constitutional negotiations and is palpably sympathetic to their national aspirations; his argument sometimes feels like a brief for Kurdish separatism. Still, Galbraith's authoritative grasp of the issues and his cogent, forthright call for disengagement ensure that the book will move into the center of the debate over American policy in Iraq. (July 17)
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Review
"Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq is a fascinating tale in its own right as well as a vital contribution to the autopsy on the worst of American wars."

-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"Peter Galbraith has seen, with balance and clarity, the whole arc of America's tragic and mismanaged relationship with Iraq. This is an essential book as the debate on what to do in Iraq continues to grow in the United States."

-- Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

"The perceptive and well-informed Galbraith has it just about right in his litany of miscalculations and mismanagements.... Fast paced."

-- Foreign Affairs

"Excellent and indispensable.... Peter Galbraith's learned and insightful book is literally a must-read for those who wish to place the Iraq war in historical context and to understand the forces at play in what may well be the dissolution of Iraq."

-- Phillip G. Henderson, National Catholic Reporter

"Galbraith's book is important because, as much as any American, he has lived the Iraq tragedy up close and personal."

-- David Ignatius, The Washington Post Book World

"Galbraith, a leading commentator on Iraq...presents a clear-eyed and persuasive case against the Bush administration's nation-building project there."

-- Publishers Weekly (starred)

"[Galbraith's] account of the blunders and the missed opportunities is by a very long way the best one published so far.... Here at last is a book written by someone who both knows about Iraq and cares about it.... How one wishes that its author had been listened to in the first place."

-- Christopher Hitchens, The Washington Times

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On March 2, in Basra's Sa'ad Square, an Iraqi tank driver turned his turret toward a two-story portrait of Saddam Hussein and fired. The shell ignited a rebellion that spread from Basra up the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys, reaching the southern outskirts of Baghdad.

In Nasiriyah, crowds literally tore Ba'ath Party officials apart. Government offices, Ba'ath Party headquarters, and military installations were looted and burned. The intensity of Shiite feelings was encapsulated for me in an incident that I witnessed a few weeks later.

I was in a refugee camp on the Iraq-Kuwait border when a U.S. Army medic in a Humvee drove into the camp. Four children, he said, had been collecting tomatoes on the Iraqi side of the border when they stepped on unexploded American ordnance. It had detonated. Was there a doctor, he asked. I rounded up the only available medical person, a Kuwaiti medical student, and drove him into Iraq. Three of the children had been moved to an American field hospital. The medic pointed a pin light in a twelve-year-old boy's eyes. There was no response.

As I watched, the boy's mother came up the road, unaware that anything had happened. Then she saw her dead son, his knees torn open. As she ripped at her hair and clothes, the first words from her lips were "Saddam did this."

About ten days after the uprising began, Saddam consolidated his position sufficiently to move some Republican Guards south. Unlike the conscript army, the Republican Guards were mostly Sunni Arabs and their officers included many from Saddam's own Tikriti clan. The Republican Guards were the regime's last line of defense and Saddam had deliberately kept them out of battle in Kuwait. They were intact and not demoralized by military defeat.

In mid-March, American troops still occupied southern Iraq, holding positions not far from the cities and towns along the Euphrates Valley. The Iraqi advance on the rebellious Shiites arguably violated the cease-fire terms ending the Gulf War dictated by the U.S. theater commander General Norman Schwarzkopf, which Iraq had accepted on March 3. American troops in Iraq could have stopped the Republican Guards and saved tens of thousands of lives. But they had strict orders not to intervene.

Saddam's retribution was swift and terrible. Republican Guard tanks blasted apart ancient city centers. Shiite shrines became battlegrounds and then slaughterhouses as rebels, clerics, and unlucky civilians were massacred. The Republican Guard attached nooses to the gun barrels of their tanks, hanging Shiite men -- several at a time -- by elevating the gun. As all this took place, American soldiers looked on, many seething with anger because they were not allowed to stop the killings. Patrick Lowe was one of the soldiers who witnessed the atrocities. Years later, he heard me on the radio and sent me an e-mail describing what he had seen:

I was a recon scout with the 1st Armored Division. I was responsible for graves registration and EPW's [enemy prisoners of war] for the Squadron. After the ground war I was assigned to an area on the Baghdad to Basrah Highway, about 3 miles outside of Basrah. I watched as Iraq helicopter gun ships flew into the city and gunned down everything in their way. I watched as troops were sent in and I can tell you, first hand, what was going on in Basrah.

I was the one that had to process the civilian refugees that fled the town. They pleaded with me to do something, anything to stop this wholesale mass murder. I heard stories of women and children being burned alive, in their homes. Women being raped to death, men being chopped up alive. Civilians being used for target practice, mass hangings. I can hear their screams and wailing to this day on bad nights. I remember one day in particular. I had been pleading for almost 3 days with my chain of command to let me do something about what was going on. The Squadron Commander flew up to my position, and we had a face to face. He ordered me to do nothing without express orders. In 12 years of service that is the closest that I ever came to disobeying a serious direct order. I even went to the point of sending a patrol out to get closer to the killing fields to see if the Iraq soldiers would shoot at them so that I had a reason to engage and protect those innocent civilians. They did not engage and so we continued to sit and watch. I have never been more ashamed of our country's actions as I was at that point.

To this day, the time I spent on the Baghdad to Basrah highways haunts me. I should have not just sat there and watched. I should have fought for them. I should have done something, anything to stop the blood bath. We are sworn to protect and yet we sat, I sat and watched hundreds of thousands die in the most horrible ways possible.

Between March and September 1991, the Iraqi Army and security services killed as many as 300,000 Shiites. One mass grave near the city of Hillah is said to hold 30,000 bodies alone.

While George H. W. Bush's call for the uprising may well have been a careless ad lib, this is not how Iraq's Shiites saw it. They believe Bush encouraged the uprising and intentionally allowed Saddam to crush it because Bush wanted Shiites to be killed.

The Kurdish uprising began in a similar manner to the Shiite uprising, but ended very differently. On March 6, 1991, a mob attacked the Ba'ath Party headquarters in Rania, a town at the edge of the mountains in Eastern Kurdistan. By March 14, rebels controlled most of Kurdistan, and on March 21 the Kurds took over Kirkuk, the place some call Kurdistan's Jerusalem.

Like the Shiites in the south, the Kurds vented their fury against the regime. When the rebels took over the General Security Directorate headquarters in Suleimania, they caught the security agents about to execute the remaining prisoners. Instead, the security men were shot. An elderly woman threw herself on one of the corpses, biting and kicking it. As the crowd tried to pull her off, she explained, "He killed three of my sons. Don't I have the right to do this to him?"

On March 30, I was finally able to accept Talabani's invitation from the month before. A Kurdish medical student accompanied me from Damascus to Qameshli, a dusty town in Syria near the junction with Iraq, and Turkey. There, Kemal Kirkuki, a peshmerga commander, arranged with the Syrian authorities for me to cross into Kurdish-held Iraq. He assigned Abdul Karim, an engineer, to be my escort and driver. Karim proved unflappable, which was the only realistic option considering what happened.

From the Syrian bank of the Tigris, I could see, and film, Iraqi Army mortars exploding near the Kurdish peshmerga positions on the Iraqi side of the river. For reasons I cannot quite fathom now, I did not worry about the danger of being killed. I was, however, worried that the shelling could make it impossible for me to return to Syria in time for meetings scheduled in a few days. My absence might call career-ending attention to my presence in Iraq. I had been deliberately vague both with the U.S. Embassy in Damascus and with my bosses at the Foreign Relations Committee about northern Iraq being on my itinerary, although the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Edward Djerejian, understood that my interest in spending Easter in Qameshli had nothing to do with the place's intrinsic charms. Karim assured me I had nothing to worry about because the peshmerga were planning an operation that night to take out the Iraqi firing positions.

We crossed the Tigris in a small boat with an outboard motor and jumped into a captured Iraqi Army Toyota Land Cruiser waiting on the Iraqi side. There were two bullet holes on the driver's side of the windshield but I decided not to ask about them. At one point the asphalt stopped and there was an area where the road had been dug up. Karim and another peshmerga had an animated discussion as to which way to go and then carefully followed the ruts made by an earlier vehicle a few hundred yards to where the asphalt resumed. Only when we were back on the road did I realize we had just threaded our way through an Iraqi minefield. Our first stop was Zakho, a town of 100,000 on the Khabur River. In the town center, politicians gave speeches to enthusiastic crowds, and political banners were displayed everyplace. I had my picture taken under a banner written in English -- "We librated [sic] Kurdistan from the aggressors" -- and then we continued to Dahuk, a city of 300,000 fifty miles farther south.

Our vehicles were the only ones heading south. All the other traffic was coming north. Not only were cars and trucks full of people, but most also had suitcases and furniture stacked on the roofs. This was not a good sign.

By the time we approached Dahuk, night had fallen. I listened to the boom of Iraqi artillery as flashes of light from the tracer rounds crossed the sky. Just outside the city we passed a rocky escarpment, and, all of a sudden, the night air was white and smoky. A phosphorous shell had exploded on the road a few seconds before. Karim veered sharply to avoid the fire and smoke.

Inside the city's administration building, I found Jalal Talabani discussing rule of law and minority rights with about seventy city leaders. A teacher asked what would happen to the collaborators with Saddam's regime, making clear his preference for a peremptory approach to justice. Talabani insisted that there had to be a fair trial. An Assyrian asked about religious rights. Talabani replied that the protection of minority religions was an essential part of the program of the Iraqi Kurdistan Front. The back and forth reminded me more of a Vermont town meeting than anything in the Iraq I knew, and as the audience became more engaged -- it was surely the first time they had ever been able to question a leader -- I wondered if I was the only one also hearing the rumble of Iraqi artillery.

Talabani invited me to speak. Perhaps a bit grandiosely, I recalled Woodrow Wilson's promise to the Kurds of their own state, and how pleased I was to be the first American official...

Customer Reviews

The End of Iraq
Excellent book -- insightful, well researched, highly readable account of the whole mess. Peter Galbraith explains the complex history and lays down the facts in a manner that is easy to digest. The End of Iraq should be required reading for all voters and all politicians. What are they dying for?

How to get out of Iraq
Chapter 11 of this book is entitled "How to Get out of Iraq", but the author doesn't really offer a solution. Instead he speaks of a somewhat tenuous "three state solution"; the three states consisting of the Shiite Arabs of the south, the Sunnis of central Iraq, and the Kurds in the north.

The Iraqi constitution, which was developed with heavy American influence allows the regions a lot of control with only a few roles being relegated to the central government. The Kurdish region has been self governing and protected by the U.S. since the first Gulf War.

I agree with other reviewers that Galbraith's account is a bit unbalanced; he seems to have a special affinity for the Kurds and he is disdainful of the Bush government's lack of respect for this region that was the only U.S. ally going into the war.

Most Iraqis were glad to see the fall of Saddam, yet the American incompetence in the occupation of Iraq has turned many Iraqis against the U.S. Galbraith's answer seems to be to withdraw U.S. troops and let history take it's course. This is hardly a creative solution in ending the war, but given the circumstances it might be the only solution.

The author did a good job of presenting the history of Iraq and the Iraqi people, something he claims that the American occupying authories failed to research, but as far as offering any realistic solutions to the end of the war in Iraq, he offers none.

Knowledgable book on Iraq
Title The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Author: Peter W. Galbraith
Rating *****
Tags iraq, george w bush, dick cheney, war, peter galbraith, kurds, sunni, shia, united states

I saw this book on the library shelf and almost passed it up, not sure if I wanted to read another book on Iraq. But I looked at the author information and saw that Peter Galbraith spent several years in the U.S. government and thought it might be an interesting perspective. And so it is. Galbraith worked for many years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, and as a professor at the National War College, He is now the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

In those jobs, particularly as the Senate staffer, he had a lot of contact with Iraqi matters, particularly with the Kurds, and his personal experiences make fascinating reading. He also is enough of an insider, and enough of an expert, to give a well-reasoned analysis of the U.S intervention in Iraq and the current situation in Iraq.

The single most telling piece of information about the U.S. involvement in Iraq is the meeting President Bush had with three important Iraqis, two of whom talked to Galbraith about the meeting. It was two months before the U.S. invasion. The Iraqis were discussing the situation in Iraq, and it became clear to them that Bush did not understand the terms Sunni and Shia, and the Iraqis spent most of the meeting trying to explain (p. 83). Galbraith uses this to point out the dangerous arrogance in the Bush administration: "...there was a belief that Iraq was a blank slate on which the United States believed it could impose its vision of a pluralistic democratic society. The arrogance came in the form of a belief that this could be accomplished with minimal effort and planning by the United States and that it was not important to know something about Iraq." (p. 84) And later: "Charles Freeman, who served as George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, put it this way: "We invaded not Iraq, but the Iraq of our dreams, a country that didn't exist, that we didn't understand. And it is therefore not surprising that we knocked the kaleidescope into a new pattern that we find surprising. The ignorant are always surprised." (p. 101)

Galbraith also gives a masterful depiction of why civil war in Iraq was almost inevitable once Saddam Hussein was gone: "All the ingredients for civil war existed in Iraq in 2003: Sunni Arabs bitter at their ouster from positions of power and privilege, and fearful of the future; Shiites insistent that Iraq will be ruled on their terms; a Sunni belief that Shiites are traitors bent not only on destroying the Iraq the Sunnis had built but also on handing over the country to a bitter national enemy [Iran]; a Shiite belief that many Sunni Arabs were unrepentant supporters of Saddam Hussein who would enthusiastically resume the killing of Shiites if ever again given a chance at power." (p. 175)

As for the future, Galbraith believes devolution is the best answer to the realities of an Iraq that was an unnatural pairing of religious and ethnic groups to begin with and which has suffered miserably from the cruel oppression of a minority. The autonomy of the Kurds is pretty well assured and in the future Kurdistan is almost certain to become an independent state, and even Turkey has become more resigned to that outcome. The Shiite South is also moving towards becoming a region, and may become fairly stable. The Sunni Arabs in the Sunni-dominated areas are beginning to see the wisdom in fighting the insurgents. It is in Baghdad that Galbraith sees no solution. Like many commentators, Galbraith believes the U.S. presence is harmful, not helpful, although he advocates strengthening the Kurds, our best ally in the region, and thinks a U.S. base there would be appropriate and not unwelcome to the Kurds.

The book also has a good index, and a useful appendix about the political parties in Iraq.

In sum, an excellent, highly recommended book.

Publication Simon & Schuster (2007), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 288 pages
Publication date 2007
ISBN 0743294246 / 9780743294249