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The 2008 Battle of Sadr City
Reimagining Urban Combat
David E. Johnson
RAND Corporation, 2013
In 2008, U.S. and Iraqi forces defeated an uprising in Sadr City, a district of Baghdad with ~2.4 million residents. Coalition forces’ success in this battle helped consolidate the Government of Iraq’s authority, contributing significantly to the attainment of contemporary U.S. operational objectives in Iraq. U.S. forces’ conduct of the battle illustrates a new paradigm for urban combat and indicates capabilities the Army will need in the future.
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7/7
The London Bombings, Islam and the Iraq War
Milan Rai
Pluto Press, 2006

This is the book Tony Blair doesn't want you to read about 7/7.

In February 2003, Tony Blair was warned by British intelligence that the invasion of Iraq would 'heighten' the risk of terrorism in Britain.

In July 2005, al-Qaeda struck in the heart of London. Despite the British Government's increasingly desperate attempts at denial, polls show that an overwhelming majority of people in Britain are convinced that there is a connection between the London bombings and the war on Iraq. A majority of Britons fault Tony Blair himself.

Using secret government documents declassified since the bombings, and leaks from British intelligence, Milan Rai exposes official deceit at the highest levels, and establishes the crucial role of British foreign policy in generating a home-grown version of al-Qaeda. Rai shows how an official report drawn up by the Home Office and Foreign Office in early 2004 identified 'foreign policy' - and the war in Iraq in particular - as a major cause of alienation among young British Muslims.

Examining the backgrounds of the 7/7 bombers, Milan Rai demonstrates that Islam is not to blame. Most importantly, the book shows us how to make sure that this never happens again -- and offers brief obituaries for the 52 people who lost their lives that day.

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The Abu Ghraib Effect
Stephen F. Eisenman
Reaktion Books, 2007

The photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison aroused worldwide condemnation—or did they? Opinion polls showed that most citizens of the United States were unmoved by the images. One reason for this relative lack of a public outcry may be the nature of the Abu Ghraib pictures themselves and what Stephen F. Eisenman terms “the Abu Ghraib effect.” By showing prisoners engaging in sexual acts, Eisenman asserts, the photos make the men look like enthusiastic participants in their own interrogation and torture. Further, these scenes repeat an ancient stereotype: the “pathos formula,” in which victims of war are shown welcoming their own punishment.

In this highly original analysis, Eisenman shows the pathos formula at work in the Abu Ghraib photos, and he describes its long history, exploring the motif’s appearance in imperial Greek and Roman Art, in the sculpture and painting of Michelangelo, and in Baroque paintings of saints and martyrs. The author also describes the equally long history of artistic protest against the formula by such diverse artists as William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub.

The Abu Ghraib Effect reveals how the pathos formula has dulled public responses to images of torture, and also urges a more effective use of political images in the fight against the so-called “war on terror.”

“Eisenman’s concepts and questions constitute a challenging discourse on politics and art.” —Art in America

 “This brilliantly argued volume should be read by all art historians.”—Art Book            

The Abu Ghraib Effect . . . traverses revolutionary terrain in its unraveling of the function of artistic metaphor in the justification of imperialist power.” —Media–Culture Review

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Acts of War
Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays
Karen Malpede
Northwestern University Press, 2011
As Karen Malpede points out in her introduction to Acts of War, tragedy "arose as a complement to, perhaps also as an antidote to, war." The greatest of the early playwrights wrote from experience—Aeschylus and Sophocles were generals in the Athenian army, and Euripides was a combat veteran. Electronic media reports war instantly, but the stage provides an unrivaled venue for facing the horror of armed conflict on a human scale.This timely anthology of plays by American and British writers bears witness to the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for combatants and civilians alike and asks what it means to be a citizen in a democracy at war. From violence on the battlefield and in the cells of Guantanamo to the toll exacted on the homefront, the seven plays collected by Malpede, Messina, and Shuman explore in depth the costs of war. Sometimes with humor or erotic charge, always with compassion and surprising insight, these contemporary plays return to the theater a necessary social edge.Karen Malpede’s introduction sets the plays in the broader contexts of theater’s roots and recent history, while award-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges provides a foreword.
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American Public Opinion on the Iraq War
Ole R. Holsti
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"A substantial contribution to understanding the role of public opinion and the news media during the Iraq War. Equally impressive, it effectively puts the domestic context of U.S. policy in historical perspective, making the book useful to historians as well as to political scientists."
---Ralph B. Levering, Davidson College

"American Public Opinion on the Iraq War sets out to chart against a detailed account of the war a nuanced assessment of how public opinion on the conflict evolved, the partisan differences that emerged, how the issue affected other areas of foreign policy opinion, and the limits of public opinion on policy. It succeeds at all of this, and it does so in a manner that is at once informative, inherently interesting, and exceptionally easy to read."
---Randolph M. Siverson, University of California, Davis

Ole R. Holsti explores the extent to which changes in public opinion reflected the vigorous public relations efforts of the Bush administration to gain support for the war and the partisanship marking debates over policies toward Iraq. Holsti investigates the ways in which the Iraq experience has led substantial numbers of Americans to reconsider their nation's proper international role, and he assesses the impact that public opinion has had on policymakers. Significantly, Holsti places his findings in a broader context to address the role of public opinion and of the media in democratic governance.

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Baghdad Bulletin
Dispatches on the American Occupation
David Enders
University of Michigan Press, 2009
"David Enders has a stunning independent streak and the courage to trust his own perceptions as he reports from outside the bubble Americans have created for themselves in Iraq."
---Joe Sacco, author of Safe Area Gorazde

"Baghdad Bulletin takes us where mainstream news accounts do not go. Disrupting the easy clichés that dominate U.S. journalism, Enders blows away the media fog of war. The result is a book that challenges Americans to see through double speak and reconsider the warfare being conducted in their names."
---Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

"Journalism at its finest and on a shoestring to boot. David Enders shows that courage and honesty can outshine big-budget mainstream media. Wry but self-critical, Baghdad Bulletin tells a story that a few of us experienced but every journalist, nay every citizen, should read."
---Pratap Chatterjee, Managing Editor and Project Director, CorpWatch

"Young and tenacious, Dave Enders went, saw, and wrote it down. Here it is-a well-informed and detailed tale of Iraq's decline under American rule. Baghdad Bulletin offers tragic politics, wacky people, and keen insights about what really matters on the ground in Iraq."
---Christian Parenti

"I wrote my first piece for Baghdad Bulletin after visiting the mass graves at Al-Hilla in 2003. The Baghdad Bulletin was essential reading in the first few months after the end of the war. I handed that particular copy to Prime Minister Tony Blair. I am only sorry that I cannot read it anymore. David Enders and his team were brave, enterprising, and idealistic."
---Rt. Hon. Ann Clwyd, member of the British Parliament


Baghdad Bulletin is a street-level account of the war and turbulent postwar period as seen through the eyes of the young independent journalist David Enders. The book recounts Enders's story of his decision to go to Iraq, where he opened the only English-language newspaper completely written, printed, and distributed there during the war.

Young, courageous, and anti-authoritarian, Enders is the first reporter to cover the war as experienced by ordinary Iraqis. Deprived of the press credentials that gave his embedded colleagues access to press conferences and officially sanitized information, Enders tells the story of a different war, outside the Green Zone. It is a story in which the struggle of everyday life is interspersed with moments of sheer terror and bizarre absurdity: wired American troops train their guns on terrified civilians; Iraqi musicians prepare a recital for Coalition officials who never show; traveling clowns wreak havoc in a Baghdad police station.

Orphans and intellectuals, activists and insurgents: Baghdad Bulletin depicts the unseen complexity of Iraqi society and gives us a powerful glimpse of a new kind of warfare, one that coexists with-and sometimes tragically veers into-the everyday rhythms of life.
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Bedrooms of the Fallen
Ashley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2014
For more than a decade, the United States has been fighting wars so far from the public eye as to risk being forgotten, the struggles and sacrifices of its volunteer soldiers almost ignored. Photographer and writer Ashley Gilbertson has been working to prevent that. His dramatic photographs of the Iraq war for the New York Times and his book Whiskey Tango Foxtrot took readers into the mayhem of Baghdad, Ramadi, Samarra, and Fallujah. But with Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson reminds us that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also reached deep into homes far from the noise of battle, down quiet streets and country roads—the homes of family and friends who bear their grief out of view.

The book’s wide-format black-and-white images depict the bedrooms of forty fallen soldiers—the equivalent of a single platoon—from the United States, Canada, and several European nations. Left intact by families of the deceased, the bedrooms are a heartbreaking reminder of lives cut short: we see high school diplomas and pictures from prom, sports medals and souvenirs, and markers of the idealism that carried them to war, like images of the Twin Towers and Osama Bin Laden. A moving essay by Gilbertson describes his encounters with the families who preserve these private memorials to their loved ones, and shares what he has learned from them about war and loss.

Bedrooms of the Fallen is a masterpiece of documentary photography, and an unforgettable reckoning with the human cost of war.
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The Betrayal of Dissent
Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century
Scott Lucas
Pluto Press, 2004
Since his death in 1950, George Orwell has been canonised as England's foremost
political writer, and the standard-bearer of honesty and decency for the honourable 'Left'. In this controversial polemic, Scott Lucas argues that the exaltation of Orwell, far from upholding dissent against the State, has sought to quash such opposition. Indeed, Orwell has become the icon of those who, in the pose of the contrarian, try to silence public opposition to US and U K foreign policy in the 'War on Terror'.

Lucas's lively and readable critique of public intellectuals including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, David Aaronovitch, and Johann Hari – who have all invoked Orwellian honesty and decency to shut down dissent – will appeal to anyone disillusioned with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Lucas contends that these leading journalists and commentators have used Orwell to justify their own political transition from radicals to upholders of the establishment. All of them play influential roles in supporting the UK and US governments' charge that opponents of war -- and those who question the motives behind American foreign policy and its implementation -- should be condemned as 'appeasers of mass murder'.

This controversial book shows how Orwell has been used since 9/11 to justify, in the guise of independent thought, the suppression of dissent. We must rescue ourselves from Orwell and from those who take on his guise so, as Lucas puts it, our ‘silencing is… vital to a "manufacture of consent" for the wars which are supposedly being fought in our name and for our good’.
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A Big Enough Lie
A Novel
Eric Bennett
Northwestern University Press, 2015

Awaiting a TV talk show appearance, John Townley is quaking with dread. He has published a best-selling memoir about the Iraq War, a page-turner climaxing in atrocity. In a green room beyond the soundstage, he braces himself to confront the charismatic soldier at the violent heart of it. But John has never actually seen the man before—nor served in Iraq, nor the military. Even so, and despite the deception, he knows his fabricated memoir contains stunning truths.

By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Lie pits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett’s novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.

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Bordering on War
A Social and Political History of Khuzestan
Shaherzad Ahmadi
University of Texas Press, 2024

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The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa
With E. D. Swinton's "The Defence of Duffer's Drift"
Michael L. Burgoyne and Albert J. Marckwardt
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the U.S. military found itself in a battle with a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally were ambiguous at best, and working with the local population was essential for day-to-day survival. From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans have penned The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa, an instructional parable of counterinsurgency that addresses the myriad of difficulties associated with war in the postmodern era.

In this tactical primer based on the military classic The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq receives ground-level lessons about urban combat, communications technology, and high-powered weaponry in an environment where policy meets reality. Over the course of six dreams, the inexperienced soldier fights the same battle again and again, learning each time—the hard way—which false assumptions and misconceptions he needs to discard in order to help his men avoid being killed or captured. As the protagonist struggles with his missions and grapples with the consequences of his mistakes, he develops a keen understanding of counterinsurgency fundamentals and the potential pitfalls of working with the native population.

Accompanied here by the original novella that inspired it, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa offers an invaluable resource for cadets and junior military leaders seeking to master counterinsurgency warfare—as well as general readers seeking a deeper understanding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as its predecessor has been a hallmark of military instruction, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa will draw the road map for counterinsurgency in the postmodern world.

Visit a website for the book here: www.defenseofJAD.com

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Deployed
How Reservists Bear the Burden of Iraq
Michael Musheno and Susan M. Ross
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"Deployed is an important and deeply moving book. Here, in this story, the heroic tradition of the American citizen-soldier lives on."
---Andrew J. Bacevich, Professor, Boston University, and author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

"Whatever your feelings about Iraq, Deployed is an important and compelling work that illuminates the real human cost of the war, and gives voice to those compelled to fight it."
---Ken Wells, Senior Editor, Condé Nast Portfolio

"Currently, there are few to no books dealing with the sociology of Iraq, and even fewer have empirical data on the experiences of American soldiers. More important, this work provides a strong and needed voice for soldiers---their words are compelling, rich, and moving."
---Morten Ender, Professor of Sociology, United States Military Academy at West Point

"This is a unique book that weaves historical, ethnographic, and organizational approaches for a study of Iraq-War military reservists. . . . the authors' findings challenge the pervading wisdom on reservists' motivations for service; the chemistry between family, reserve duty, and relations with regular military; and the effect that service in Iraq had on them."
---Jerry Lembcke, Associate Professor of Sociology, Holy Cross College

What is it like to be one of the citizen-soldiers summoned to duty in Iraq and Afghanistan? The events of 9/11 were a call to arms for many reservists, as shock, anger, and fear propelled large numbers to volunteer for the opportunity to serve their country in the Middle East. Even the most patriotic, however, had not expected that the wars would last so long or that the Army Reserve would supply so much of the manpower.

Using the soldiers' own voices, Deployed draws upon the life stories of members of an Army Reserve MP Company, who were called to extraordinary service after September 11. The book explores how and why they joined the Army Reserve, how they dealt with the seismic changes in their lives during and after deployment, the evolution of their relationships inside and outside their military unit, and their perspectives on the U.S. Army.

Musheno and Ross uncover five pathways that led these citizens to join the reserves, showing how basic needs and cultural idioms combined to stimulate enlistments. Whatever path led to enlistment, the authors find that citizen-soldiers fall into three distinct categories: adaptive reservists who adjust quickly to the huge changes in their lives abroad and at home, struggling reservists whose troubles are more a product of homegrown circumstances than experiences specific to serving in a war zone, and reservists who are dismissive of military life while they live it and oppose the war even as they fight it. Perhaps most important, Deployed challenges the prevailing stereotype of returning soldiers as war-damaged citizens.

Jacket photograph: AP Photo/Hutchinson News, Travis Morisse.

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Desert Mementos
Stories of Iraq and Nevada
Caleb S. Cage
University of Nevada Press, 2017
Desert Mementos is a collection of loosely connected short stories set during the early stages of the Iraq War (2004 and 2005). The stories rotate from battles with insurgents and the drudgery of the war machine in Iraq to Nevada, where characters are either preparing for war, escaping it during their leave, or returning home having seen what they’ve seen.
 
Cage captures similarities in the respective desert landscapes of both Iraq and Nevada, but it is not just a study in contrasting landscapes. The inter-connected stories explore similarities and differences in human needs from the perspectives of vastly different cultures. Specifically, the stories deftly capture the overlap in the respective desert landscapes of each region, the contrasting cultures and worldviews, and the common need for hope. Taken together, the stories represent the arc of a year-long deployment by young soldiers. Cage’s stories are bound together by the soldier’s searing experiences in the desert, bookended by leaving and returning home to Nevada, which in many ways can be just as disorienting as patrolling the Iraq desert.
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Empire's Law
The American Imperial Project and the 'War to Remake the World'
Edited by Amy Bartholomew
Pluto Press, 2006
"Empire's Law is first rate -- a 'must read' for students of international law, politics and ethics. It includes excellent contributions by key theorists and impressive case studies. This provocative and original collection should be read and taught in classes on both the undergraduate and graduate level."
Jean L. Cohen Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

"This remarkable collection of essays illuminates -- more fully than any other volume -- the world order costs of the Iraq War, especially the radical denial of the relevance of international law in the US's pursuit of global empire. To understand this overarching geopolitical challenge of the early 21st century, citizens the world over should treat Empire's Law as required reading."
Richard A. Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice Emeritus, Princeton University and currently Visiting Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Right now there can't be enough discussion of America's role in world politics ... This is a much-needed collection from leading scholars."
Neil Stammers, Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex

What is the legacy of the war in Iraq? Can democracy and human rights really be imposed "by fire and sword"? This book brings together some of the world's most outstanding theorists in the debate over empire and international law. They provide a uniquely lucid account of the relationship between American imperialism, the use and abuse of "humanitarian intervention", and its legal implications. Empire's Law is ideal for students who want a comprehensive critical introduction to the impact that the doctrine of pre-emptive war has had on our capacity to protect human rights and promote global justice.

Leading contributors including Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Jurgen Habermas, Ulrich Preuss, Andrew Arato, Samir Amin, Reg Whitaker, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck tackle a broad range of issues. Covering everything from the role of Europe and the UN, to people's tribunals, to broader theoretical accounts of the contradictions of war and human rights, the contributors offer new and innovative ways of examining the problems that we face. It is essential reading for all students who want a systematic framework for understanding the long-term consequences of imperialism.

Amy Bartholomew is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law at Carleton University.
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Erasing Iraq
The Human Costs of Carnage
Michael Otterman, Richard Hil, Paul Wilson, and Dahr Jamail
Pluto Press, 2010

For nearly two decades, the US and its allies have prosecuted war and aggression in Iraq. Erasing Iraq shows in unparalleled detail the devastating human cost.

Western governments and the mainstream media continue to ignore or play down the human costs of the war on Iraqi citizens This has allowed them to present their role as the benign guardians of Iraqi interests. The authors deconstruct this narrative by presenting a portrait of the total carnage in Iraq today as told by Iraqis and other witnesses who experienced it firsthand.

Featuring in-depth interviews with Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Western countries, Erasing Iraq is a comprehensive and moving account of the Iraqi people's tragedy.

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Frustrated Empire
US Foreign Policy, 9/11 to Iraq
David Ryan
Pluto Press, 2007
David Ryan examines the broad contexts of US foreign policy and the lingering aftermath of the Vietnam War that shaped the opportunistic framing of 9/11 and paved the way for the long-held neo-conservative desire for regime change and war in Iraq.
He explores the construction of the cultural framework for war following 9/11, the legitimacy of military force in Afghanistan, the rise of anti-Americanism, within the broader contexts of the struggle over legitimacy, identity and leadership.
Turning the "clash of civilizations" thesis on its head, Ryan presents a careful analysis of the evolution of US foreign policy and its engagement with Iraq through the 1980s. While 9/11 provided the opportunity, the post-Vietnam context provides a more pertinent framework for this reflection on the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the strategic implications for US foreign policy.
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Generation Vet
Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University
Sue Doe
Utah State University Press, 2014

Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student veterans for English and writing studies departments.

In work with veterans in writing-intensive courses and community contexts, questions of citizenship, disability, activism, community-campus relationships, and retention come to the fore. Moreover, writing-intensive courses can be sites of significant cultural exchanges—even clashes—as veterans bring military values, rhetorical traditions, and communication styles that may challenge the values, beliefs, and assumptions of traditional college students and faculty.

This classroom-oriented text addresses a wide range of issues concerning veterans, pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing program administration. Written by diverse scholar-teachers and written in diverse genres, the essays in this collection promise to enhance our understanding of student veterans, composition pedagogy and administration, and the post-9/11 university.

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Ghost Riders of Baghdad
Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge
Daniel A. Sjursen
University Press of New England, 2015
From October 2006 to December 2007, Daniel A. Sjursen—then a U.S. Army lieutenant—led a light scout platoon across Baghdad. The experiences of Ghost Rider platoon provide a soldier’s-eye view of the incredible complexities of warfare, peacekeeping, and counterinsurgency in one of the world’s most ancient cities. Sjursen reflects broadly and critically on the prevailing narrative of the surge as savior of America’s longest war, on the overall military strategy in Iraq, and on U.S. relations with ordinary Iraqis. At a time when just a handful of U.S. senators and representatives have a family member in combat, Sjursen also writes movingly on questions of America’s patterns of national service. Who now serves and why? What connection does America’s professional army have to the broader society and culture? What is the price we pay for abandoning the model of the citizen soldier? With the bloody emergence of ISIS in 2014, Iraq and its beleaguered, battle-scarred people are again much in the news. Unlike other books on the U.S. war in Iraq, Ghost Riders of Baghdad is part battlefield chronicle, part critique of American military strategy and policy, and part appreciation of Iraq and its people. At once a military memoir, history, and cultural commentary, Ghost Riders of Bahdad delivers a compelling story and a deep appreciation of both those who serve and the civilians they strive to protect. Sjursen provides a riveting addition to our understanding of modern warfare and its human costs.
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Going to War in Iraq
When Citizens and the Press Matter
Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Conventional wisdom holds that the Bush administration was able to convince the American public to support a war in Iraq on the basis of specious claims and a shifting rationale because Democratic politicians decided not to voice opposition and the press simply failed to do its job.
            Drawing on the most comprehensive survey of public reactions to the war, Stanley Feldman, Leonie Huddy, and George E. Marcus revisit this critical period and come back with a very different story. Polling data from that critical period shows that the Bush administration’s carefully orchestrated campaign not only failed to raise Republican support for the war but, surprisingly, led Democrats and political independents to increasingly oppose the war at odds with most prominent Democratic leaders. More importantly, the research shows that what constitutes the news matters. People who read the newspaper were more likely to reject the claims coming out of Washington because they were exposed to the sort of high-quality investigative journalism still being written at traditional newspapers. That was not the case for those who got their news from television. Making a case for the crucial role of a press that lives up to the best norms and practices of print journalism, the book lays bare what is at stake for the functioning of democracy—especially in times of crisis—as newspapers increasingly become an endangered species.
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Good Medicine, Hard Times
Memoir of a Combat Physician in Iraq
Edward P. Horvath, MD
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Good ​Medicine, Hard Times is the moving memoir of one of the most senior-ranking combat physicians to have served on the battlefields of the second Iraq war. Former US Army Colonel Edward P. Horvath, MD, brings readers through the intricacies of war as he relates stories of working to save the lives of soldiers, enemies, and civilians alike and shares the moral dilemmas faced by medical professionals during war. Enlisting in the Army as a fifty-nine-year-old physician, Dr. Horvath knew that he had a greater calling in life: to save the “neighbor’s kid”—no matter who that neighbor or the kid might be. Over his three deployments, he strived to do that amid cultural clashes, insurgent attacks, military controversy, and the suffering of children caught in the crossfire. In his clear-eyed, empathetic, and unforgettable accounthe shows what it means to provide compassionate care in the most trying of circumstances, always keeping in mind that every person he cares for is someone’s child.
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In Time of War
Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq
Adam J. Berinsky
University of Chicago Press, 2009

From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political history—but when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristics—such as what they cost in lives and resources—than by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues.

With the help of World War II–era survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of “the good war” that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace.

With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influence—and ultimately illuminate—each other.

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Iraq | Perspectives
Benjamin Lowy
Duke University Press, 2011
Selected by William Eggleston as Winner
The Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography

Benjamin Lowy’s powerful and arresting color photographs, taken over a six-year period through Humvee windows and military-issue night vision goggles, capture the desolation of a war-ravaged Iraq as well as the tension and anxiety of both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians. To photograph on the streets unprotected was impossible for Lowy, so he made images that illuminate this difficulty by shooting photographs through the windows and goggles meant to help him, and soldiers, to see. In doing so he provides us with a new way of looking at the war—an entirely different framework for regarding and thinking about the everyday activities of Iraqis in a devastated landscape and the movements of soldiers on patrol, as well as the alarm and apprehension of nighttime raids.

“Iraq was a land of blast walls and barbed wire fences. I made my first image of a concrete blast wall through the window of my armored car. These pictures show a fragment of Iraqi daily life taken by a transient passenger in a Humvee; yet they are a window to a world where work, play, tension, grief, survival, and everything in between are as familiar as the events of our own lives. . . . [In] the ‘Nightvision’ images . . . as soldiers weave through the houses and bedrooms of civilians during nighttime military raids, they encounter the faces of their suspects as well as bystanders, many of whom are parents protecting their children. . . . I hope that these images provide the viewer with momentary illumination of the fear and desperation that is war.”—Benjamin Lowy

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The Iraq War
A Military History
Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2005

In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America’s most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.

The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America’s buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America’s armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new “American way of war” as it has unfolded in Iraq.

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Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East
Jonathan Cook
Pluto Press, 2008

Journalist Jonathan Cook explores Israel’s key role in persuading the Bush administration to invade Iraq, as part of a plan to remake the Middle East, and their joint determination to isolate Iran and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons that might rival Israel’s own.
 
This concise and clearly argued book makes the case that Israel's desire to be the sole regional power in the Middle East neatly chimed with Bush’s objectives in the “war on terror”.
 
Examining a host of related issues, from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to the role of Big Oil and the demonisation of the Arab world, Cook argues that the current chaos in the Middle East is the objective of the Bush administration – a policy that is equally beneficial to Israel.

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The Last Deployment
How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq
Bronson Lemer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

In 2003, after serving five and a half years as a carpenter in a North Dakota National Guard engineer unit, Bronson Lemer was ready to leave the military behind. But six months short of completing his commitment to the army, Lemer was deployed on a yearlong tour of duty to Iraq. Leaving college life behind in the Midwest, he yearns for a lost love and quietly dreams of a future as an openly gay man outside the military. He discovers that his father’s lifelong example of silent strength has taught him much about being a man, and these lessons help him survive in a war zone and to conceal his sexuality, as he is required to do by the U.S. military.

            The Last Deployment is a moving, provocative chronicle of one soldier’s struggle to reconcile military brotherhood with self-acceptance. Lemer captures the absurd nuances of a soldier’s daily life: growing a mustache to disguise his fear, wearing pantyhose to battle sand fleas, and exchanging barbs with Iraqis while driving through Baghdad. But most strikingly, he describes the poignant reality faced by gay servicemen and servicewomen, who must mask their identities while serving a country that disowns them. Often funny, sometimes anguished, The Last Deployment paints a deeply personal portrait of war in the twenty-first century.

 
InSight Out Book Club selection
 
Bronson Lemer named one of Instinct magazine’s Leading Men 2011
 
QPB Book Club selection

Finalist, Minnesota Book Awards

Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association

Amazon Top Ten 10 Gay & Lesbian Books of 2011
 
 
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Making the World Safe for Capitalism
How Iraq Threatened the US Economic Empire and had to be Destroyed
Christopher Doran
Pluto Press, 2012

The Iraq war defined the first decade of the twenty-first century – leading to mass protests and raising profound questions about domestic politics and the use of military force. Yet most explanations of the war have a narrow focus either on political personalities or oil.

Christopher Doran provides a unique perspective, arguing that the drive to war came from the threat Iraq might pose to American economic hegemony if the UN sanctions regime was ended. Doran argues that this hegemony is rooted in third world debt and corporate market access. It was protection of these arrangements that motivated US action, not Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction or a simplistic desire to seize its oil.

This book will provide new insights on the war which still casts a shadow over global politics, and will have wide appeal to all those concerned about the Middle East, world peace and global development.

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Mass Deception
Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq
Scott A. Bonn
Rutgers University Press, 2010
The attacks of 9/11 led to a war on Iraq, although there was neither tangible evidence that the nation's leader, Saddam Hussein, was linked to Osama bin Laden nor proof of weapons of mass destruction. Why, then, did the Iraq war garner so much acceptance in the United States during its primary stages?



Mass Deception argues that the George W. Bush administration manufactured public support for the war on Iraq. Scott A. Bonn introduces a unique, integrated, and interdisciplinary theory called "critical communication" to explain how and why political elites and the news media periodically create public panics that benefit both parties. Using quantitative analysis of public opinion polls and presidential rhetoric pre- and post-9/11 in the news media, Bonn applies the moral panic concept to the Iraq war. He critiques the war and occupation of Iraq as violations of domestic and international law. Finally, Mass Deception connects propaganda and distortion efforts by the Bush administration to more general theories of elite deviance and state crime.
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The New Counterinsurgency Era
Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars
David H. Ucko
Georgetown University Press, 2009

Confronting insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has recognized the need to “re-learn” counterinsurgency. But how has the Department of Defense with its mixed efforts responded to this new strategic environment? Has it learned anything from past failures?

In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko examines DoD’s institutional obstacles and initially slow response to a changing strategic reality. Ucko also suggests how the military can better prepare for the unique challenges of modern warfare, where it is charged with everything from providing security to supporting reconstruction to establishing basic governance—all while stabilizing conquered territory and engaging with local populations. After briefly surveying the history of American counterinsurgency operations, Ucko focuses on measures the military has taken since 2001 to relearn old lessons about counterinsurgency, to improve its ability to conduct stability operations, to change the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and to account for successes gained from the learning process.

Given the effectiveness of insurgent tactics, the frequency of operations aimed at building local capacity, and the danger of ungoverned spaces acting as havens for hostile groups, the military must acquire new skills to confront irregular threats in future wars. Ucko clearly shows that the opportunity to come to grips with counterinsurgency is matched in magnitude only by the cost of failing to do so.

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Operation Homecoming
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families, Updated Edition
edited by Andrew Carroll
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Operation Homecoming is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases to inspire U.S. soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and their families to record their wartime experiences. Encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front. These unflinching eyewitness accounts, private journals, short stories, and letters offer an intensely revealing look into extraordinary lives and are an unforgettable contribution to wartime literature.
 
“One of the chanted mantras of our time is, ‘But I support the troops.’ Terrific. Now read Operation Homecoming to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.”—Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal
 
“This anthology is the honest voice of war. . . . In the end, they are all one voice, a voice we must hear, and must not forget.”—Jeff Shaara
 
“These voices are stirring, chilling, and unforgettable.”—Bobbie Ann Mason
 
“[Captures] what journalists cannot, no matter how close they get—firsthand accounts from the warriors and the families they leave behind.”—Chicago Tribune
 
 
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Overreach
Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq
Michael MacDonald
Harvard University Press, 2014

In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a fair number of Americans thought the idea was crazy. Now everyone, except a few die-hards, thinks it was. So what was going through the minds of the talented and experienced men and women who planned and initiated the war? What were their assumptions? Overreach aims to recover those presuppositions.

Michael MacDonald examines the standard hypotheses for the decision to attack, showing them to be either wrong or of secondary importance: the personality of President George W. Bush, including his relationship with his father; Republican electoral considerations; the oil lobby; the Israeli lobby. He also undermines the argument that the war failed because of the Bush administration’s incompetence.

The more fundamental reasons for the Iraq War and its failure, MacDonald argues, are located in basic axioms of American foreign policy, which equate America’s ideals with its interests (distorting both in the process) and project those ideals as universally applicable. Believing that democratic principles would bring order to Iraq naturally and spontaneously, regardless of the region’s history and culture or what Iraqis themselves wanted, neoconservative thinkers, with support from many on the left, advocated breaking the back of state power under Saddam Hussein. They maintained that by bringing about radical regime change, the United States was promoting liberalism, capitalism, and democracy in Iraq. But what it did instead was unleash chaos.

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Perpetual War
Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
Bruce Robbins
Duke University Press, 2012
For two decades Bruce Robbins has been a theorist of and participant in the movement for a "new cosmopolitanism," an appreciation of the varieties of multiple belonging that emerge as peoples and cultures interact. In Perpetual War he takes stock of this movement, rethinking his own commitment and reflecting on the responsibilities of American intellectuals today. In this era of seemingly endless U.S. warfare, Robbins contends that the declining economic and political hegemony of the United States will tempt it into blaming other nations for its problems and lashing out against them.

Under these conditions, cosmopolitanism in the traditional sense—primary loyalty to the good of humanity as a whole, even if it conflicts with loyalty to the interests of one's own nation—becomes a necessary resource in the struggle against military aggression. To what extent does the "new" cosmopolitanism also include or support this "old" cosmopolitanism? In an attempt to answer this question, Robbins engages with such thinkers as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Anthony Appiah, Immanuel Wallerstein, Louis Menand, W. G. Sebald, and Slavoj Zizek. The paradoxes of detachment and belonging they embody, he argues, can help define the tasks of American intellectuals in an era when the first duty of the cosmopolitan is to resist the military aggression perpetrated by his or her own country.

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Post-Ethical Society
The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular
Douglas V. Porpora, Alexander G. Nikolaev, Julia Hagemann May, and Alexander Jenkins
University of Chicago Press, 2013
We’ve all seen the images from Abu Ghraib: stress positions, US soldiers kneeling on the heads of prisoners, and dehumanizing pyramids formed from black-hooded bodies. We have watched officials elected to our highest offices defend enhanced interrogation in terms of efficacy and justify drone strikes in terms of retribution and deterrence. But the mainstream secular media rarely addresses the morality of these choices, leaving us to ask individually: Is this right?

In this singular examination of the American discourse over war and torture, Douglas V. Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, Julia Hagemann May, and Alexander Jenkins investigate the opinion pages of American newspapers, television commentary, and online discussion groups to offer the first empirical study of the national conversation about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib a year later. Post-Ethical Society is not just another shot fired in the ongoing culture war between conservatives and liberals, but a pensive and ethically engaged reflection of America’s feelings about itself and our actions as a nation. And while many writers and commentators have opined about our moral place in the world, the vast amount of empirical data amassed in Post-Ethical Society sets it apart—and makes its findings that much more damning.
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Pre-Deployment Stress, Mental Health, and Help-Seeking Behaviors Among Marines
Carrie M. Farmer
RAND Corporation, 2014
As part of an evaluation of the Marine Corps Operational Stress Control and Readiness (OSCAR) program, this report describes the methods and findings of a large survey of marines who were preparing for a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan in 2010 or 2011. The results are among the first to shed light on the pre-deployment mental health status of marines, as well as the social resources they draw on when coping with stress and their attitudes about seeking help for stress-related problems.
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Private Soldiers
A Year in Iraq with a Wisconsin National Guard Unit
Benjamin Buchholz
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2007
In April 2005 they received the official alert: The Wisconsin Army National Guard's 2-127th Infantry Battalion was being mobilized. After training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, the 620 soldiers of the Gator Battalion would serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom, providing armed convoy escort and route security throughout all of Iraq, from Umm Qasr in the south to Mosul in the far north. Their mission would take them into the most dangerous regions of Iraq, and during the next year the battalion would withstand hundreds of attacks, see dozens wounded, and lose three members killed in action.
 
Private Soldiers chronicles the 2-127th's year-long deployment from the unique perspective of the soldiers themselves. Written and photographed by three battalion members, the book provides a rare first-hand account of war and life in Iraq. Fascinating soldier interviews reveal the effects of deployment on the troops and on their families back home, and interviews with Iraqi civilians describe the Iraqis' perceptions of life, war, and working alongside Wisconsin troops. Brilliant photography illuminates the 2-127th's year, from training to "boots on the ground" to their return home. And candid photos taken by battalion members capture the soldiers' day-to-day lives and camaraderie.
 
An extremely timely and relevant account of soldiers' lives, Private Soldiers honors Wisconsin's participants in the Iraq war and helps readers understand the war's human side.
 
All royalties from sales of Private Soldiers will go to the 2-127th's family support groups and to funds established in memoriam of the battalion members who gave their lives in the Iraq war.
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The Rape of Mesopotamia
Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
Lawrence Rothfield
University of Chicago Press, 2009

On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the five years since that day, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human heritage is incalculable.

With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield answers the complicated question of how this wholesale thievery was allowed to occur. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that led to the invading forces’ utter indifference to the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage.

Bringing his story up to the present, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.

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A Revolution in Military Adaptation
The US Army in the Iraq War
Chad C. Serena
Georgetown University Press, 2011

During the early years of the Iraq War, the US Army was unable to translate initial combat success into strategic and political victory. Iraq plunged into a complex insurgency, and defeating this insurgency required beating highly adaptive foes. A competition between the hierarchical and vertically integrated army and networked and horizontally integrated insurgents ensued. The latter could quickly adapt and conduct networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to fighting via prescriptive plans under a centralized command and control.

To achieve success, the US Army went through a monumental process of organizational adaptation—a process driven by soldiers and leaders that spread throughout the institution and led to revolutionary changes in how the army supported and conducted its operations in Iraq. How the army adapted and the implications of this adaptation are the subject of this indispensable study. Intended for policymakers, defense and military professionals, military historians, and academics, this book offers a solid critique of the army’s current capacity to adapt to likely future adversary strategies and provides policy recommendations for retaining lessons learned in Iraq.

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Saber’s Edge
A Combat Medic in Ramadi, Iraq
Thomas A. Middleton
University Press of New England, 2010
The National Guardsman, the citizen soldier called upon to fight for this nation in a time of war, is one of the least understood — and perhaps one of the most compelling — figures of the Iraq War. Saber’s Edge is the story of a middle-aged Vermont firefighter called upon to be a soldier in the worst place on earth — Ramadi, Iraq. In a few short weeks Thomas A. Middleton went from being a suburban dad to a combat medic traveling between platoons, filling in for other medics and engaging in some of the fiercest and most crucial fighting of the war. This is the war as experienced from the ground level: days of tedium interspersed with the adrenalin of combat; moments of lighthearted laughter broken by the sorrow of loss. This is also the story of the unique wartime perspective of our guardsmen. Unlike the raw, unformed young recruit, the mature guardsman often comes with the burdens of family, experience, and a developed sense of self. Accordingly, Sgt. Middleton’s story chronicles the inner conflict created by his long-time professional role as a healer and his newfound life as a warrior in the urban battlefields of Iraq. Thrust into a culture and theater of war that he is little equipped or trained for, the author tries to make sense of his actions. Coarsened by combat and increasingly disdainful of the local population, he receives solace and insight from his life-long faith and ultimately emerges as a man who understands his role in the world. Saber’s Edge is also the story of the Green Mountain Boys of Task Force Saber: a story of comradeship and communion amid fierce street fighting in a crucial theater of the Iraq War (the eventual site of the “Al Anbar Awakening”). Based on the author’s first-hand experiences and interviews with other soldiers, Saber’s Edge presents a riveting account of modern urban warfare and the inspiring story of one man reconciling his actions in warfare.
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The Sacking of Fallujah
A People's History
Ross Caputi
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The Iraqi city of Fallujah has become an epicenter of geopolitical conflict, where foreign powers and non-state actors have repeatedly waged war in residential neighborhoods with staggering humanitarian consequences. The Sacking of Fallujah is the first comprehensive study of the three recent sieges of this city, including those by the United States in 2004 and the Iraqi-led operation to defeat ISIS in 2016.

Unlike dominant military accounts that focus on American soldiers and U.S. leaders and perpetuate the myth that the United States "liberated" the city, this book argues that Fallujah was destroyed by coalition forces, leaving public health crises, political destabilization, and mass civilian casualties in their wake. This meticulously researched account cuts through the propaganda to uncover the lived experiences of Fallujans under siege and occupation, and contextualizes these events within a broader history of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Relying on testimony from Iraqi civilians, the work of independent journalists, and documentation from human rights organizations, Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn place the experiences of Fallujah's residents at the center of this city's recent history.
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Severance Songs
Joshua Corey
Tupelo Press, 2011
In his third full-length book of poems, Joshua Corey puts the sonnet to the test with this sequence of fractured, ventilated, and unrhymed poems written in the aftermath of 9/11 while Corey was living at a pastoral remove from war and terror in upstate New York. The tension between idyllic personal circumstances and horrific world-historical events led Corey to produce this series of layered poems, variously sardonic and sincere in tone.

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Sleeping with Custer and the 7th Cavalry
An Embedded Reporter in Iraq
Walter C. Rodgers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

An essential document of the first American war of the new century

Under a full opalescent moon in the spring of 2003, CNN correspondent Walter C. Rodgers and three colleagues climbed into an unarmored Humvee loaded with satellite transmission equipment and fell into column formation with the MIAI Abrams battle tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles of Apache Troop, Third Squadron, of the storied 7th Cavalry and crossed the Line of Departure between Kuwait and Iraq. Sleeping with Custer and the 7th Cavalry: An Embedded Reporter in Iraq is Rodgers’s account of the fight from the Kuwaiti border to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

Rodgers was embedded with the “tip of the tip of the spear,” the armored reconnaissance unit tasked with clearing the way for the invasion of Iraq. For the next three weeks Rodgers—a seasoned combat correspondent who has covered armed conflicts in the West Bank, along the “Green Line” in Lebanon, and in Sarajevo, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan—was a first-person witness to the opening campaign of the most significant war America has embarked upon since Vietnam.

Rodgers and his journalistic colleagues in Operation Iraqi Freedom became pioneers in the process of embedding, the placing of journalists who can transmit video reports in real time under combat conditions with no censoring authority to block their reporting. During this journey into war, Rodgers and his crew embraced the dangers, the numbing fatigue, and the moments of stark fear of the young armored cavalrymen they lived with twenty-four hours each day, an experience that created for them the lifelong bond that only soldiers serving together under fire share.

Rodgers also details his return visit to Iraq a year later, reflecting on the nature of war and sharing his personal feelings about a conflict that has claimed the lives of over fifteen hundred American men and women. The volume is illustrated with photographs taken during the invasion by Jeff Barwise, the CNN engineer who accompanied Rodgers.

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Soft Weapons
Autobiography in Transit
Gillian Whitlock
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,Marjane Satrapi’s comics, and “Baghdad Blogger” Salam Pax’s Internet diary are just a few examples of the new face of autobiography in an age of migration, globalization, and terror. But while autobiography and other genres of life writing can help us attend to people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard, life narratives can also be easily co-opted into propaganda. In Soft Weapons, Gillian Whitlock explores the dynamism and ubiquity of contemporary life writing about the Middle East and shows how these works have been packaged, promoted, and enlisted in Western controversies.

Considering recent autoethnographies of Afghan women, refugee testimony from Middle Eastern war zones, Jean Sasson’s bestsellers about the lives of Arab women, Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Honor Lost, personal accounts by journalists reporting the war in Iraq, Satrapi’s Persepolis, Nafisi’s book, and Pax’s blog, Whitlock explores the contradictions and ambiguities in the rapid commodification of life memoirs. Drawing from the fields of literary and cultural studies, Soft Weapons will be essential reading for scholars of life writing and those interested in the exchange of literary culture between Islam and the West.

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Success and Failure in Limited War
Information and Strategy in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars
Spencer D. Bakich
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions.

Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state’s ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems.

Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.
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War Is Not a Game
The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built
Levinson, Nan
Rutgers University Press, 2016
War Is Not a Game tells the story of this new soldiers’ antiwar movement, showing why it was born, how it quickly grew, where it has struggled, what it accomplished, and how it continues to resonate in the national conversation about our military and our wars. Nan Levinson reveals the individuals behind the movement, painting an unforgettable portrait of these working-class veterans who refused to be seen as simply tragic victims or battlefront heroes and instead banded together to become leaders of a national organization. The paperback is updated with a new foreword by the author.
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The War Makes Everyone Lonely
Graham Barnhart
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In his first collection of poems, many of which were written during his years as a US Army Special Forces medic, Graham Barnhart explores themes of memory, trauma, and isolation. Ranging from conventional lyrics and narrative verse to prose poems and expressionist forms, the poems here display a strange, quiet power as Barnhart engages in the pursuit and recognition of wonder, even while concerned with whether it is right to do so in the fraught space of the war zone. We follow the speaker as he treads the line between duty and the horrors of war, honor and compassion for the victims of violence, and the struggle to return to the daily life of family and society after years of trauma.
            Evoking the landscapes and surroundings of war, as well as its effects on both US military service members and civilians in war-stricken countries, The War Makes Everyone Lonely is a challenging, nuanced look at the ways American violence is exported, enacted, and obscured by a writer poised to take his place in the long tradition of warrior-poets.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War
Ashley Gilbertson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Arriving in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion, unaffiliated with any newspaper and hoping to pick up assignments along the way, Ashley Gilbertson was one of the first photojournalists to cover the disintegration of America’s military triumph as looting and score settling convulsed Iraqi cities. Just twenty-five years old at the time, Gilbertson soon landed a contract with the New York Times, and his extraordinary images of life in occupied Iraq and of American troops in action began appearing in the paper regularly. Throughout his work, Gilbertson took great risks to document the risks taken by others, whether dodging sniper fire with American infantry, photographing an Iraqi bomb squad as they diffused IEDs, or following marines into the cauldron of urban combat.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot gathers the best of Gilbertson’s photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to overtake Falluja, and ultimately, the country’s first national elections. No Western photojournalist has done as much sustained work in occupied Iraq as Gilbertson, and this wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. Accompanying each section of the book is a personal account of Gilbertson’s experiences covering the conflict. Throughout, he conveys the exhilaration and terror of photographing war, as well as the challenges of photojournalism in our age of embedded reporting. But ultimately, and just as importantly, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tells the story of Gilbertson’s own journey from hard-drinking bravado to the grave realism of a scarred survivor. Here he struggles with guilt over the death of a marine escort, tells candidly of his own experience with post-traumatic stress, and grapples with the reality that Iraq—despite the sacrifice in Iraqi and American lives—has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.

A searing account of the American experience in Iraq, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is sure to become one of the classic war photography books of our time.
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Why War?
The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez
Philip Smith
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Why did America invade Iraq? Why do nations choose to fight certain wars and not others? How do we bring ourselves to believe that the sacrifice of our troops is acceptable? For most, the answers to these questions are tied to struggles for power or resources and the machinations of particular interest groups. Philip Smith argues that this realist answer to the age-old "why war?" question is insufficient. Instead, Smith suggests that every war has its roots in the ways we tell and interpret stories.

Comprised of case studies of the War in Iraq, the Gulf War, and the Suez Crisis, Why War? decodes the cultural logic of the narratives that justify military action. Each nation, Smith argues, makes use of binary codes—good and evil, sacred and profane, rational and irrational, to name a few. These codes, in the hands of political leaders, activists, and the media, are deployed within four different types of narratives—mundane, tragic, romantic, or apocalyptic. With this cultural system, Smith is able to radically recast our "war stories" and show how nations can have vastly different understandings of crises as each identifies the relevant protagonists and antagonists, objects of struggle, and threats and dangers.

The large-scale sacrifice of human lives necessary in modern war, according to Smith, requires an apocalyptic vision of world events. In the case of the War in Iraq, for example, he argues that the United States and Britain replicated a narrative of impending global doom from the Gulf War. But in their apocalyptic account they mistakenly made the now seemingly toothless Saddam Hussein once again a symbol of evil by writing him into the story alongside al Qaeda, resulting in the war's contestation in the United States, Britain, and abroad.

Offering an innovative approach to understanding how major wars are packaged, sold, and understood, Why War? will be applauded by anyone with an interest in military history, political science, cultural studies, and communication.
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The World Says No to War
Demonstrations against the War on Iraq
Stefaan Walgrave
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
On February 15, 2003, the largest one-day protest in human history took place as millions of people in hundreds of cities marched in the streets, rallying against the imminent invasion of Iraq. This was activism on an unprecedented scale.
 
The World Says No to War strives to understand who spoke out, why they did, and how so many people were mobilized for a global demonstration. Using surveys collected by researchers from eight countries—Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States—The World Says No to War analyzes how the new tools of the Internet were combined with more conventional means of mobilization to rally millions, many with little experience in activism, around common goals and against common targets.
 
Contributors: W. Lance Bennett, U of Washington; Michelle Beyeler, U Bern; Christian Breunig, U of Toronto; Mario Diani, U of Trento; Terri E. Givens, U of Texas, Austin; Bert Klandermans, Free U Amsterdam; Donatella della Porta, European U Institute; Wolfgang Rüdig, U of Strathclyde; Sidney Tarrow, Cornell U; Peter Van Aelst, U of Antwerp.
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