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The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq
Times Books
June 2005
384 pages
ISBN: 0805078681
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
America's leading expert on democracy delivers the first
insider's account of the U.S. occupation of Iraq-a sobering
and critical assessment of America's effort to implant
democracy
In the fall of 2003, Stanford
professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza
Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as
an adviser to the the American occupation authorities.
Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he
felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a
worthy goal now that Saddam Hussein's regime had been
overthrown. He also thought he could do some good by putting
his academic expertise to work in the real world. So in
January 2004 he went to Iraq, and the next three months
proved to be more of an education than he bargained
for.
Diamond found himself part of one of the most
audacious undertakings of our time. In Squandered Victory
he shows how the American effort to establish democracy
in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists
but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed
opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped
assure that the transition to independence would be neither
peaceful nor entirely democratic. He brings us inside the
Green Zone, into a world where ideals were often trumped by
power politics and where U.S. officials routinely issued
edicts that later had to be squared (at great cost) with
Iraqi realities. His provocative and vivid account makes
clear that Iraq-and by extension, the United States-will
spend many years climbing its way out of the hole that was
dug during the fourteen months of the American occupation.
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