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How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Simon and Schuster
July 2006
On Sale: July 11, 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 0743294238
EAN: 9780743294232
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
The End of Iraq, definitive, tough-minded,
clear-eyed, describes America's failed strategy toward that
country and what must be done now. The United
States invaded Iraq with grand ambitions to bring it
democracy and thereby transform the Middle East. Instead,
Iraq has disintegrated into three constituent components: a
pro-western Kurdistan in the north, an Iran-dominated Shiite
entity in the south, and a chaotic Sunni Arab region in the
center. The country is plagued by insurgency and is in the
opening phases of a potentially catastrophic civil war.
George W. Bush broke up Iraq when he ordered
its invasion in 2003. The United States not only removed
Saddam Hussein, it also smashed and later dissolved the
institutions by which Iraq's Sunni Arab minority ruled the
country: its army, its security services, and the Baath
Party. With these institutions gone and irreplaceable, the
basis of an Iraqi state has disappeared. The
End of Iraq describes the administration's strategic
miscalculations behind the war as well as the blunders of
the American occupation. There was the failure to understand
the intensity of the ethnic and religious divisions in Iraq.
This was followed by incoherent and inconsistent strategies
for governing, the failure to spend money for
reconstruction, the misguided effort to create a national
army and police, and then the turning over of the country's
management to Republican political loyalists rather than
qualified professionals. As a matter of
morality, Galbraith writes, the Kurds of Iraq are no less
entitled to independence than are Lithuanians, Croatians, or
Palestinians. And if the country's majority Shiites want to
run their own affairs, or even have their own state, on what
democratic principle should they be denied? If the price of
a unified Iraq is another dictatorship, Galbraith writes in
The End of Iraq, it is too high a price to pay.
The United States must focus now, not on
preserving or forging a unified Iraq, but on avoiding a
spreading and increasingly dangerous and deadly civil war.
It must accept the reality of Iraq's breakup and work with
Iraq's Shiites, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs to strengthen the
already semi-independent regions. If they are properly
constituted, these regions can provide security, though not
all will be democratic. There is no easy exit
from Iraq for America. We have to relinquish our present
strategy -- trying to build national institutions when there
is in fact no nation. That effort is doomed, Galbraith
argues, and it will only leave the United States with an
open-ended commitment in circumstances of uncontrollable
turmoil. Peter Galbraith has been in Iraq many
times over the last twenty-one years during historic turning
points for the country: the Iran-Iraq War, the Kurdish
genocide, the 1991 uprising, the immediate aftermath of the
2003 war, and the writing of Iraq's constitutions. In The
End of Iraq, he offers many firsthand observations of
the men who are now Iraq's leaders. He draws on his nearly
two decades of involvement in Iraq policy working for the
U.S. government to appraise what has occurred and what will
happen. The End of Iraq is the definitive account of
this war and its ramifications.
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