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
- Notes on 12 days in Bora-Bora, Moorea, and Tahiti
- Reading Feb 2026
- 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)
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Interview d’une lectrice de la bibliothèque de Dimikuy
- Résumé de la sortie de l’animateur de ABVBF à la bibliothèque de Dohoun
- Photos from Tuy province libraries in Burkina Faso from the past month
- Animation à la bibliothèque de Koumbia
- Compte rendu de la rencontre extraordinaire de Amis des Bibliothèques de Villages du Burkina Faso/ABVBF
- Organisation d’une séance de dessin à la bibliothèque de Koumbia
- Une visite de l’animateur de ABVBF à la bibliothèque communautaire de Koho
- Some recent photos from the mobile library in Hounde, Burkina Faso
- Remise du deuxième prix du meilleur gérant des bibliothèques de la zone du Tuy
- Rencontre des gérants des bibliothèques du Tuy le 4 avril 2026 à la bibliothèque de Karaba