Anyone who collects books on contemporary Iraq may be running out of shelf space, given the current spate of books on Iraq appearing five years on from the start of the invasion. Top leaders in the US and UK continue to stoutly defend the decision to go to war, and to talk up “achievements” in Iraq, but the new books offer a more nuanced analysis. In “Defeat: Why they lost Iraq”, published by IB Tauris in the UK and Counterpoint in the US, British journalist Jonathan Steele challenges the conventional wisdom that the “dreadful reality” of the Coalition's “defeat” was due to inadequate planning. Stele argues that defeat was inevitable, and that the occupation was doomed from the start. “No matter how efficient, sensitive, generous and intelligent the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had been, it could not have succeeded. Occupations are inherently humiliating. People prefer to run their own affairs; they resent foreigners taking over their country.” Steele explains that centuries of humiliation have scarred the Iraqi national psyche and created a powerful and deeply-felt nationalism. Iraq was not like Germany and Japan after the Second World War. “For Western powers to invade a Muslim country in the heart of the Middle East in the twenty-first century was a very different story. The region has a strong collective memory of imperial intrusion and a deep sense of anti-Western nationalism based on patriotic resentment against powerful alien outsiders who lord it over local peoples and in the process challenge their Muslim identity.” Another book written by a Briton is Sir Hilary Synnott's “Bad Days in Basra: My Turbulent Time as Britain's Man in Southern Iraq”, published by IB Tauris. Sir Hilary was summoned in June 2003 from near retirement to be offered a job as “King of the South”. He stayed in Basra for six months. Synnott does not agree that the invasion was hopeless from the start, and he focuses on mistakes that were made in the early phase of occupation. “There was a complete absence of any plan” he says. “I was sent to Basra with no piece of paper in my hand.” He thinks the CPA and its head Paul Bremer would have done better to have concentrated more on local projects than on big country-wide works. He criticizes both US “spectacular misjudgments” and UK mistakes. Iraqis in Basra became increasingly angered at the inability of the occupation to provide basic services. The most controversial Iraqi exile involved in planning the invasion was Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and darling of US neoconservatives. He comes under scrutiny in “The Man Who Pushed America to War: the Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi” (Nation Books) by NBC News Investigative Producer Aram Roston. Roston investigates how Chalabi and his INC associates introduced Iraqi defectors to US news organizations and intelligence agencies with false or exaggerated accounts of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). One key point in Roston's book is Chalabi's links with the leadership in Iran. Roston told Mother Jones magazine that she did not find evidence that Chalabi was an Iranian agent in the sense of being controlled or directed by Iranian intelligence or receiving money from them, though some see him as an “agent of influence”. She said: “In the end I came away thinking the key question, from a US perspective, was not whether or not Chalabi was an Iranian agent, but whether he was more useful to Iran's intelligence services and government or to American's intelligence services and government. Here I think it was indisputable that he was far more useful to Iran.” The evocatively-titled “Howling in Mesopotamia: an Iraqi-American Memoir”, published by Beaufort Books, is the work of Haider Ala Hamoudi, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Hamoudi was born in the US to Iraqi parents, and during the war he lived with relatives in Baghdad. An uncle, Hummam Hamoudi, became chair of the Iraqi Constitutional Committee. Hamoudi spent two years in Iraq. “Between air-conditioning failures, power cuts, limited grocery options, appallingly slow Internet connections, a near entire lack of recreation, and of course, a constant fear of annihilation, life was becoming unbearable, my ability to write limited, and my ability to teach Iraqi students psychologically exhausting.” He did though conduct a romance with an Iraqi lawyer, whom he eventually married in the USA. A J Rossmiller's book “Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures from Baghdad to the Pentagon”, published by Presidio Press, is written by a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst. Rossmiller worked for the Direct Action Cell in Iraq for six months, trying to identify and target insurgents. He witnessed the disastrous strategies of counterterrorism and detention, including mass detentions of Iraqis with little regard as to their guilt or innocence. Rossmiller saw grave defects in how information was processed when he went to work at the Pentagon. His assessments of the situation in Iraq, which were ultimately shown to have been accurate, were routinely discarded as being too pessimistic and off-message, and were constantly altered in order to be closer to “delusional” White House projections. The London-based Canadian journalist and writer Gwynne Dyer is author of “After Iraq: Anarchy and Renewal in the Middle East”, published by Thomas Dunne Books in the US and Yale University Press in the UK. Dyer argues that the US is losing the war, that it has badly destabilized the Middle East, and that the region is about to change fundamentally. “Everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice.” One of the most controversial books on Iraq is that of the neoconservative, strongly pro-Israeli Douglas Feith, number three at the Pentagon when the invasion was launched. His “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism” is to be published soon by Harper Collins. The Washington Post reported that Feith slams former secretary of state Colin Powell, retired general Tommy Franks, the CIA, and Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer. But the vice president/executive director of Harper Collins Calvert D Morgan Jr protested in a letter published by the Washington Post that the report misquoted Feith. For an overview of the discourse around the invasion, the reader can turn to “Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak”, by the self-proclaimed “founders of the Institute of Expertology” Christopher Cerf and Victor S Navasky (Simon and Schuster). “Mission Accomplished!” surveys statements made by “experts” on Iraq over the past five years. A reviewer on the Amazon website, awarding the book five stars, wrote: “It's truly a joy to see all these utterly depressing quotes gathered in one place for easy reference...” One often-repeated, though discredited, claim used to justify the war was that there was a link between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out 9/11. New York Times columnist William Safire said this was an “undisputed fact”. Another claim was that the war would be cheap. The then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction.” Radio host and commentator Rush Limbaugh said that what happened at Abu Ghraib was “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation” at Yale University. Syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham said UN weapons inspector Blix “couldn't find the stretch marks on Rosie O'Donnell.” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said on the allegations that Saddam had WMD: “Only a fool, or possibly a Frenchman, would think otherwise.” __
