Here, in the magisterial yet plain-spoken style of A People's History of the United States, is historian Howard Zinn's long-awaited telling of these last six years of United States history, a time when catastrophic machinations of war have dictated our foreign and domestic policy, and when voices of resistance have appeared in the unlikeliest places. Perhaps more than any other American, Howard Zinn has helped us understand ourselves by deepening our understanding of our own history.
'Brings home the full enormity of the Iraq war' - Simon Jenkins, The GuardianWhen troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, most people expected an easy victory. Instead, the gamble we took was a grave mistake, and its ramifications continue to reverberate through the lives of millions, in Iraq and the West. As we gain more distance from those events, it can be argued that many of the issues facing us today - the rise of the Islamic State, increased Islamic terrorism, intens...
'Combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with Apocalypse Now as it builds towards its terrible climax...Extraordinary' New York Times Iraq's 'Triangle of Death', 2005. A platoon of young soldiers from a U.S. regiment known as 'the Black Heart Brigade' is deployed to a lawless and hyperviolent area just south of Baghdad. Almost immediately, the attacks begin: every day another roadside bomb, another colleague blown to pieces. As the daily violence chips away, and chips away at th...
Writing under a pen name, a former member of the British Royal Marine Commandos provides an insider account of the shadowy world of private U.S. military contracting, revealing operations too dangerous and sensitive to be officially acknowledged, including the search for Osama Bin Laden and the response to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.
This incredibly ambitious, book-length poem takes on the modern problem of war. The poem's great achievement is that it situates our own age, not as a golden age, but as one notable for its harshness and brutality, especially towards noncombatants, as well as for the beauty of the language that can be found to describe and understand that brutality, and perhaps to change it. Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid allow us, two and a half millennia later, to experience the complexity and contradiction...
The essential “on the ground” report on the fastest-growing new threat in the Middle East, from the winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award Born of the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the Islamic State astonished the world in 2014 by creating a powerful new force in the Middle East. By combining religious fanaticism and military prowess, the new self-declared caliphate poses a threat to the political status quo of the whole region. In The Rise of Islamic State, Patrick Co...
American Foreign Policy and The Politics of Fear (Routledge Global Security Studies)
This edited volume addresses the issue of threat inflation in American foreign policy and domestic politics. The Bush administration's aggressive campaign to build public support for an invasion of Iraq reheated fears about the president's ability to manipulate the public, and many charged the administration with 'threat inflation', duping the news media and misleading the public into supporting the war under false pretences. Presenting the latest research, these essays seek to answer the ques...
Chilcot Report
by Sir John Chilcot, Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sir Roderic Lyne, Sir Martin Gilbert, and Baroness Usha Kumari Prashar
This book explains and elaborates the concept of alliance security dilemma through a case study of two similar countries caught in the same situation: Germany, which opposed the US decision to attack Iraq in 2003, and Japan, which supported it.
Was the Iraq war really about oil? As a senior oil advisor for the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and briefly as minister of oil, Gary Vogler thought he knew. But while doing research for a book about his experience in Iraq, Vogler discovered that what he knew was not the whole story-or even the true story. The Iraq war did have an oil agenda underlying it, one that Vogler had previously denied. This book is his attempt to set the record straight. Iraq and the Poli...
Now Generation Kill tells the soldiers' story in their own words. The narrative focuses on a platoon of 23 marines, many of them vetrans of Afghanistan, whose elite reconnaissance unit spearheaded the blitzkrieg on Iraq. This is the story of young men that have been trained to become ruthless killers. It's about surviving death. It's about taking part in a war many questioned before it even began. Evan Wright was the only reporter with Frist Recon, which operated well ahead of most other forces,...
From the start of the 20th century to the most recent major offensives, here are fifty accounts of the battles that made the modern world, described in superb detail by historians and writers including John Keegan, Alan Clark, John Strawson, Charles Mey, John Pimlott, and John Laffin.All the major conflicts are covered, from two world wars, through Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Chechnya, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the battles featured are: the Somme, Passchendaele, Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, E...
America was determined to go to war. Curveball had the information they needed. One problem...He was lying. 'Curveball' was the undercover code name given to the mysterious defector whose assertions set the Iraq War in motion. A desperate young Iraqi applying for political asylum in Munich, his first-hand 'evidence' on Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme would ultimately be a central plank of the Bush administration's justification in launching an invasion. Trouble was, virtually every...
Winner of The Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award for Excellence in U.S. Army History Writing – Journals, memoirs and letters, June 2008 Shortly after the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the war in Iraq became the most confusing in U.S. history, the high command not knowing who to fight, who was attacking Coalition troops, and who among the different Iraqi groups were fighting each other. Yet there were a few astute officers like Lt. Col. Christopher Hughes, commanding...
As the planes hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Aidan Delgado was in the process of enlisting in the U.S. Army Reserve. Two years later, he arrived in Iraq with the 320th Military Police Company. As he witnessed firsthand the brutality of the occupation and the abuse of unarmed Iraqis, Delgado came to believe that war was immoral and ran counter to his Buddhist principles. He turned in his weapon and began the long process of securing conscientious objector status. His book is ur...
Marine Sergeant Clint Van Winkle flew to war on Valentine's Day 2003. His battalion was among the first wave of troops that crossed into Iraq, and his first combat experience was the battle of Nasiriyah, followed by patrols throughout the country, house to house searches, and operations in the dangerous Baghdad slums. But after two tours of duty, certain images would not leave his memory - a fragmented mental movie of shooting a little girl; of scavenging parts from a destroyed, blood-spattered...
"In 1979 I was a Presbyterian minister, a hospital chaplain, and a pacifist. In 1980, I left the church and joined the Air Force. The day I showed up at the recruiter's office, I was twenty-eight, under-exercised, a wimp, and extraordinarily ignorant of the military. I intended it to be a stopgap measure while I figured out what to do next, but I never got bored." When Cheryl Dietrich joined the US Air Force, she began a transformation from overweight introvert and military neophyte into one of...