From 2006. Not the best-written book. Lots of vignettes, often little narrative flow. He drops characters that he should be coming back to: Cheney is never mentioned after page 100 for example. I don’t think any Iraqi leaders other than Chalabi and Moqtada al-Sadr are mentioned, and even then only tangentially. But if you want to be convinced that the whole invasion and occupation was a fiasco, and the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were responsible, this is a great introduction and heard to beat. I was convinced. Usually I am pretty skeptical. I remember my parents had The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer (they kept it out of sight, in the garage… imagine!), and that kind of a book about the Iraq invasion would be worth reading.
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Recent Posts
- Reading Nov-Dec 2025 and Jan 2026
- AI as an existential threat – Kevane preliminary draft
- “What can it do?” A living list of computational problems that deep learning/AI/neural nets can or seems likely to “do” (at varying cost and efficacy)
- Reading August-September 2025
- The typical popular sci-fi version of AI posing an existential risk?
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Sumbrungu Community Library nighttime reading
- Résumé du livre Une grande mère criminelle
- Organisation d’une séance de discussion autour d’un livre à la bibliothèque de Dimikuy
- Librarians of Tuy monthly meeting January 2026, Burkina Faso
- Impressions sur la production de livres CMH au Burkina Faso
- Compte rendu de la première rencontre des gérants de la zone du Tuy
- Science fiction books for libraries in Burkina Faso and Ghana
- Animation d’une séance de lecture à la bibliothèque de Dimikuy
- Nyariga Community Library in Ghana, photos January 2026
- Visite à la bibliothèque de Béréba, Burkina Faso