Praeger Security International
2 total works
According to the Bush administration, the war in Iraq ended in May 2003 when the president pronounced mission accomplished from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. Yet, fighting, resistance, and American casualties continue. Stephen Pelletiere argues that it is Iraqi suspicion of the Americans' motive-the belief that the United States is out to tear the state apart-that is fueling the current rebellion. Resistance in Iraq has become a national struggle, tied to the mood of Iraqis generally, as well as to anger fed by experiences of the whole people over the course of the last quarter century. Americans see Iraq as a failed state because they lack knowledge of those experiences and of Iraqi history. That is what Pelletiere has set out to remedy. In doing so, he relates American behavior in Iraq to the wider sphere of U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf specifically and the Middle East overall, positioning the war as part of a larger geo-political struggle that encompasses not just the Iraqis or the Iranians, but the Israelis and all of the other client states of the United States in the Middle East.
A former CIA analyst looks at nearly three decades of U.S. Middle East policy to examine the pervasive and too-often disastrous influence of Israel's right wing Likud party.
In this revelatory volume, Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA's Iraq analyst in the 1980s, argues that not only did Rumsfeld's plan for a quick, decisive military victory in Iraq reflect the ideas of Israel's right-wing party, but that it exemplifies Lukid's profound, little-understood, and at times disatrous influence on the United States' Middle East policy for nearly three decades.
Israel in the Second Iraq War: The Influence of Likud describes U.S.-Israeli relations from the fall of the Shah-when President Reagan anointed the Israel as America's surrogate in the Middle East-through a string of Mid-East policy fiascos, including the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, and the ill-fated second Iraq War, which Likudniks in the Pentagon promoted and which produced the ongoing Iraqi resistance. The book also chronicles the growth of resistance movements including Hamas and Hezbollah, arguing that these are not part of a vast jihadi conspiracy, but are instead Arab attempts to stop land seizures by the Israelis and the Americans.