No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos by Charles Ferguson
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Book Reviews of No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos
Book Review: or the decline and fall of the US Empire
Summary: 5 Stars
This is heartbreaking on more fronts than you can readily imagine. If you want to know why the US election in 2008 matters so much around the world, read this book. In unblinking and unbiased assessment, Ferguson details not just the imperial hubris but the brute ignorance of a samll group of capitalist exploiters looking to make one more killing on the backs of those not among the ruling class in America.
Instead of Caligula, there is Cheney, and his puppet boy President, whose track record in business and government is that he absolutely ruined financially every organization he was part of because he refused to listen to people who knew better, be it oil, baseball, the state of Texas, the US federal government...
Barbara Bodine, on the ground immediately after the fall of the Hussein government and in cahrge of getting the city of Baghdad up and running, put it best:
"There were 2 or 3 ways to get it (reconstruction) right and 500 or more to get it wrong, and we got all (500) of them."
As a consequence, the designed incompetence that has functioned as a smoke screen for Cheney and his corporate buddies put consecutive bumblers and enablers in a volatile situation and they successfully made absoluetly everything worse: Wolfowicz, Bremer and on to Petraeus. It is a gallery of very bad actors exploiting a disaster with the mentality that it's all going to hell in a hangbasket, so let's grab what we can.
The interviews speak for themselves. Rumsfeld refused to speak or comment. The White House could care less. The US is now 1 trillion in the whole and counting, and the sad prospect comes across with blunt and dismaying clarity in the final section of the book. A bloodbath seems ineveitable, unless a military coup, i.e. a controlled bloodbath, is effected by the Sunni military and their foreign backers (but not the US). Short of that, a series of civil wars destabilizing the economic tipping point of the rest of the planet has been unleashed and is all but inevitable.
Cheney, Bush, and their cadre will effect what the criminals of other wars never managed - they'll get away with it.
Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, it is abundantly clear that an immediate pullout is impossible. No matter who wins the general election, the prospect of staying another 100 years, as McCain suggests, is possible and would in much shorter time ruin what is left of the US.
The electorate in the US thinks that withdrawal has something to do with bringing soldiers home. Instead, as this book spells out quite intensely, it has to do with just how precariously interconnected the entire globe has become. Whether extrication is possible without intense disaster remians to be seen. If you saw the film, that tells only part of the story. This book will keep you up awake the rest of your life, tossed between extraordinary anger at the exploiters and certain dismay for the generations which follow and will pay the price, one way or another, for the evil done.
Book Review: An Interesting and Informative Summary of Indictable Incompetence!
Summary: 5 Stars
Interviews from those involved document why we didn't start planning for the occupation until two months before the invasion - and then excluded those who know the most, why we stood by and watched extensive looting, why we naively believed that an expatriate would be quickly accepted as the new leader of a fractured country, why we disbanded the Iraq Army - despite numerous warnings not to do so, why reconstruction monies disappeared by the billions, and why our troops were poorly equipped.
Bottom Line: How many lives were needlessly lost by these mistakes that should have been avoided?
Book Review: Devastating expose of war's incompetence
Summary: 5 Stars
This was an enjoyable and informative read. Ferguson avoids preaching to the reader; he lets the interviews speak for themselves. All of the incompetence of the occupation comes out in the book. He interviews top officials, not just low-level sniping critics. This book succeeds marvelously. Pick this up ASAP for the good of your country.Book Review: The best
Summary: 5 Stars
Charles Ferguson's update of his superb film on the Bush war in Iraq captures the problems of the current White House to a tee. Ferguson gives over his book to interviews with top players and it works perfectly. Let them talk and you know the score. This is a terrific book and I recommend it highly.Book Review: A rhetoric-free look at the failings of the Iraqi invasion.
Summary: 5 Stars
I cant recommend this film enough. A clear and balanced look at the grave miscalculations made before and during our occupation of Iraq. Everyone should see this film: Dem and Repub alike.
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