Book Description
As the American diplomat chosen by President Bush to direct the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad in May of 2003. For fourteen danger-filled months, he worked tirelessly to realize the vision he and President Bush share of a free and democratic New Iraq.
MY YEAR IN IRAQ: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope is a candid and vital account of this world-shaping task and the daunting challenges lying in wait. With his unique insider perspective, Bremer takes us from the ancient lanes in the holy city of Najaf to the fires of a looted and lawless Baghdad; from the White House Situation Room to the Pentagon E-Ring; from making the case for more U.S. troops to helping Iraq's new leaders write a liberal constitution to unify a traumatized and divided Iraqi people.
Download Description
BAGHDAD WAS BURNING With these words, Ambassador L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer begins his gripping memoir of fourteen danger-filled months as America's proconsul in Iraq. My Year in Iraq is the only senior insider's perspective on the crucial period following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. In vivid, dramatic detail, Bremer reveals the previously hidden struggles among Iraqi politicians and America's leaders, taking us from the ancient lanes in the holy city of Najaf to the White House Situation Room and the Pentagon E-Ring. My Year in Iraq is required reading for all those interested in the real story of how America responded to its gravest recent overseas crisis.
Customer Reviews:
Another one of Bush's incomptents.......2007-04-27
Bremer's year in Iraq was the turning point in the Iraq war...a war that was not considered in is consequences by Bush or his cronyies, bomb first, think later if at all! It was a year when both security and economic issues were in desperate need of the best minds possible...instead we got Bremer. It is not that the endless problems that came up were entirely Bremer's fault, except in part..the war architects had not even minimally anticipated what would happen, thus they destroyed central leadership [....], then through bombing destroy resource basis, then through disbanding security forces (Bremer) unleashed competitive violence and underlyng ethnic conflict.amazing thatthey did not see it coming...incompetent and America and the Iraqis pay and pay and pay.........
Microcosmic Partial Picture in the First Person.......2007-02-15
I took great care to read this book slowly. See my list on Iraq Evaluations.
Bremer is clearly a decent man, hard-working, totally clueless about Middle Eastern and military affairs, and put in a no-win situation by George Bush and Dick Cheney. Bremer bugged out after a year, and now, two years later, the Administration we have a quagmire and a possible attack on Iran building up.
Quite incredulously, for me at least, Bremer actually sees Iraq as the crux of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and yet is totally oblivious to the fact that we created this battlefield opportunity for Iran and Al-Qaeda. See At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA
Early on the book makes it clear that Iraqis were delighted to be liberated, dismayed at the occupation, and completely unable to agree among themselves about how to achieve a legitimate government capable of stabilizing and reconstructing the country.
This is a very self-serving book, extraordinarily selective in its recollections. A few things that really struck me:
1) This book starts without reference to the path to war paved by lies from the Vice President and other members of the Bush "team." It begins by saying that it was "widely accepted" that Weapons of Mass Destruction were the proper cause of the invasion. BALONEY. See instead Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
2) There is ZERO discussion in this book of the massive role played by Halliburton, Bechtel, and others. There is ZERO discussion of the 18 billion dollars he had to work with and managed to lose, completely apart from the contracting. There is ample discussion about the pretense of progress, but ZERO discussion about the thousands of contracting failures, the abysmal failure of the entire reconstruction effort. See Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation And the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq and a host of other books on our failures there, such as Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
3) There is a lot of blame to direct elsewhere, clearly justified but not at all making up for the fact that Bush-Cheney lied to America and the world and created this mess:
a) Chalabi was a constant irritant, obstruction, and general twit. This is the man who was fired by CIA for being a thief and a liar, convicted in Jordan of bank fraud, and still allowed by the US to be very active in Iraq.
b) Wolfowitz's rosy predictions are labeled as "fantasy," and the author on more than one occasion talks about Doug Feith in a manner that is the diplomatic equivalent of General Frank's blunt statement in his own book: "the dumbest bastard on the planet." See Tommy Franks "American Soldier."
c) The Governing Council created early on was lazy, working quarter days four days a week. They simply did not compute the demand for hard serious work.
d) He takes General Jay Garner to task for allowing looting (ultimately 17 of 20 Ministry headquarters buildings were completely looted, as well as electrical and water plants and petroleum pumping stations), and also calls General Garner's 15 May turn-over plan a reckless fantasy. I posit instead that the neo-cons were sucked in by Iranian agent Chalabi and never realized how deep they were into fantasy land. I think Garner was close to getting it right early on.
e) He very properly points out that he inherited a deep structural crisis, a country coming off fifty years of neglected infrastructure, with virtually every sector of society dysfunctional. For context see The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
f) The CIA and the Marines shut down his attempt to arrest Muqtada Al-Sadt, the Shi'ite cleric that has since then completely disrupted the country.
g) On more than one occasion the Spanish Army elements refused to fight and refused to follow direction. The Ukrainians also come in for direct criticism from Bremer.
There are a number of absolutely fascinating tid-bits, a few of which are listed here:
1) The Iraqi military had 16,000 generals while the US military (all of it, worldwide) has only 300.
2) The military consisted largely of Sunni officers who abused enlisted Shi'ite soldiers.
3) Saddam Hussein had implemented virtual starvation genocide against the Shi'ites, with severe malnutrition being the norm within that majority.
4) Because of the complete breakdown of all sanitation measures, he estimates that 500,000 tons of human waste each day were dumped into the two rivers.
5) Hussein printed money with inflation up to 100,000 per year--at the same time, 50% of all Iraqis said by the author to be unemployed when he arrived. [On this later point, he does not address the fact that the contractors received billions and instead of employing Iraqis, imported many other nationalities as slave wages.]
6) In his view, there were three sources of instability: looters, die-hard Bathists, and the Mukhabarat paramilitary.
7) Saudi Arabia was known to be egging the Sunnis on and in my view; this makes the Iranian interest in Shi'ite self-preservation completely appropriate. The author also notes that Syria and Lebanon were training and sending in foreign fighters (in the low thousands). Saudi Arabian royalty is EVIL. See See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism and also Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
8) The author blames the French (and to a lesser degree the Russians) for keeping Saddam Hussein in power, while making no mention at all of the strong support provided by the USA to Saddam Hussein in his genocide against the Kurds and his genocidal chemical war with Iran.
9) On an extremely important point, I found it beyond belief that the author, the "Viceroy" was put into Baghdad without a command & control communications and computing set of vans, tents, generators, and so on. The military incapacitated him with quiet scorn.
The author claims in this book that the insurgency was "largely unpredicted" (page 223) and this is of course not true. However, I do believe him when he says he tried over and over again to get Washington and the military to take the insurgency seriously. His problems with Washington are very similar to those described by General Wesley Clark in Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat
The author has 164 references to Bush and only 26 to Cheney. He really did deal with the President on many matters after the fact, but I credit Dick Cheney will totally trashing our entire global program. See Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The author has good things to say about the World Bank (this is prior to Wolfowitz taking it over). They completed 15 assessments in six weeks instead of six months, and were very helpful.
There are only 12 mentions of Iran in this book. That is the epitaph for our failed invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iran wins, we lose.
A diplomat desperately trying to justify his efforts.......2007-01-23
I think that this is one of the important books of the Iraq war. Bremer is perhaps the most important figure of the most important part of it, namely, the attempted reconstruction of the country. This book describes his efforts toward that end, and attempts to justify his decisions.
Unfortunately, the effort is a disaster. Bremer really didn't have much experience with this kind of work, and it appears clear from the beginning that right-wing ideology was the driving factor in his decision making -- and most of these decisions suffered for that. For instance, Bremer refused to re-open the state-run businesses, because he thought the private sector should run all business -- this immediately threw tens of thousands of people out of work. Similarly, the draconian de-Baathification forced almost all qualified managers from their jobs. Bremer also, and I think unforgivably, doesn't spend any time comparing this attempted rebuilding to the very successful post WW II efforts. In particular, the de-Baathification seems to have been based on the de-Nazification in Germany, without really looking too closely at what might be different between Iraq and Germany.
Still, it's an interesting book, and a point of view that should be a part of any study of the war. The book could well have been 10 times as long, and it would be interesting to see what parts were edited out. I share others recommendations of "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" as a great companion book.
UK Review.......2007-01-09
This is a very comprehensive account of Paul Bremer's time in Iraq, and for almost the first time gives a real insight into the political in fighting both in Iraq and in Washington as the US attempts to bring democracy to this nation. He has been unfairly treated in other books on Iraq and this tends to set the record straight. I very good read for those who are seriously interested in the Iraq situation.
Barely a first-person source, more like selective telling of the facts.......2006-12-29
Read this book with Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life to get the full impact of Bremer's story. Pay attention to the details Bremer glosses over, like what Bernie Kerik did (the guy in charge of rebuilding Iraq police). Ignored is the background and selection process of the people who served Bremer and how "loyalists" were more valued over experience and skill.
At times selective in the facts and other times ignorant, this book is useful only in reading the perceptions of reality the viceroy of Iraq held.
Product Description
True first edition, limited to 1450 numbered copies, signed by the author.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Middle East Policy, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2006. The length of the article is 1787 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.(Book review)
Author: Robert Dreyfuss
Publication:
Middle East Policy (Magazine/Journal)
Date: March 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 13
Issue: 1
Page: 146(3)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
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My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.(Book review): An article from: Middle East Quarterly
Michael Rubin
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
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ASIN: B000S7XYYE
Release Date: 2007-09-27 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Middle East Quarterly, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2007. The length of the article is 539 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope.(Book review)
Author: Michael Rubin
Publication:
Middle East Quarterly (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 14
Issue: 3
Page: 89(2)
Article Type: Book review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
A comprehensive visual guide and reference source for over 1600 birds of America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and the Polar regions, with expert analysis of size, shape, plumage, habitat, breeding, nests, eggs and food.- Illustated throughout with over 1800 color artworks, maps and photographs.- A natural history section, featuring habitat artworks and tips on birdwatching, examines the evolution of birds and how they use flight, habitat, predatory instincts and migration to survive in their environment.
Customer Reviews:
A very useful reference - excellent photos!.......2000-03-14
Exhaustive and complete. Very informative for every bird-lover
Most complete reference of seabirds available.......1999-08-09
This is an absolutely indispensable reference on sea birds, including penguins. It is the most complete book available on the subject and makes identifying the birds a breeze. It is truly fascinating book.
Detailed information on nearly 300 species is included. Detailed juvenile & adult descriptions are given for each bird. Facts about distribution & population are also provided.
There are over 800 photographs that are arranged from six to nine to a page. Many have never been published before. Usually there are at least two clear close-up photographs of each species.
Captions list the species, approximate age, & location. Photographic acknowledgments are listed in the back. The topography guide is a nice bonus. This is a beautiful and informative book for any bird lover.
Book Description
This is the most accurate and comprehensive checklist of birds ever published in a single volume. First published over twenty years ago, The Howard and Moore Checklist was the first such compact list to include not only all the known species in the world but subspecies too. This new edition of the highly respected reference volume has been fully revised and updated throughout. Enlarged significantly, it has benefited from the input of five regional consultants--one for each of the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Palaearctic--who have assisted with a thorough and rigorous reassessment of all taxonomic data. This review has led to the inclusion of many valuable new footnotes and references; there are some 4,000 footnotes explaining taxonomic choices, and 3,000 references. All authorities for newly described taxa (whether recognized now or not) are given with full references, for the first time in any checklist.
The introductory sections set forth the rationale of the sequence of families adopted as well as key concepts and new developments in the study of avian taxonomy; discussed are the relative attributes of the Biological Species Concept and the Phylogenic Species Concept, which are critical to our understanding of taxonomy and related issues. Also covered are new developments in taxonomy; those areas where consensus is fast developing are highlighted. Finally, all main entries and synonyms are indexed by English and scientific names--the latter to subspecies level for the first time.
- The most accurate and comprehensive taxonomic checklist of birds of the world ever published in a single volume
- Now in its third, thoroughly revised and updated edition
- Existing data rigorously referenced by a team of regional experts
- All species and subspecies described since the mid-1980s fully referenced, for the first time in any checklist
- Around 4,000 footnotes explaining taxonomic choices, and 3,000 references including all authorities for recently described taxa
- Introductory sections discuss the rationale behind the list sequence, as well as key concepts and new developments in the study of avian taxonomy.
- All taxa fully indexed by English and scientific names--the latter to subspecies level for the first time
Customer Reviews:
The Complete Checklist of the Birds of the World - A Review.......2006-02-24
This is the only work I have come across so far dealing with all known species as well as subspecies of birds of the world. Each species is listed with all known geographic subspecies (if any) with full scientific name (i.e. including author and year). Also, the editors add a review of the incorrect scientific nomenclature in current use, for example, Psittacula calthorpae is widely spelt as Psittacula calthropae, which is incorrect according to the editors. The last section of the book contains an extensive bibliography (of some 2000 references), so this is useful to anyone who will be reading further about the subject. I highly recommend this work for anyone serious about birds.
Average customer rating:
- An invaluable reference for lovers of Audubon's art
- Great Book, a few flaws
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Birds of America: The Complete Collection of 435 Illustrations from the Most Famous Bird Book in the World
John James Audubon
Manufacturer: Laurel Glen Publishing
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 1571456120 |
Customer Reviews:
An invaluable reference for lovers of Audubon's art.......2007-03-13
This review refers to the book subtitled "The complete collection of 435 illustrations from the most famous bird book in the world." The book was published in several editions between 1997 and 2000. The publishers of which I am aware include Welcome Rain, Laurel Glen, and Wordsworth. Do not confuse this book with other books reproducing Audubon's Birds of America with the same or similar title.
This is the best book available for anyone who wishes to see accurate reproductions of Audubon's greatest work, the Double Elephant Folio edition of Birds of America. Produced in collaboration with the uniquely talented printer/artist, Robert Havell, Audubon's massive work is (as the subtitle of this book says) the most famous bird book in the world. As such, the Double Elephant Folio deserves to be reproduced as it really is, with all titles, part and plate numbers, and credits to artist and printer that are part of the original plates. This is the only book of several on the market (whether used or in print) that allows the reader to see the plates-all 435 of them--as they actually appear in the original work.
As a collector and art dealer, I use this book constantly, but I have never spent much time looking at the text. It consists of brief notes to each plate (primarily factual information on the specific birds pictured). Although the 2-page introduction gets the basic facts of Audubon's life right, I noticed many significant errors. The book also has organizational flaws (including the lack of an index to the plates or even page numbers to allow you to quickly locate specific plates). Nevertheless, the color and printing is very good to excellent on most of the images, and it is generally superior to that of other Audubon art books. Until something better comes along, I would consider this book a "must-have" for any serious student or collector of Audubon's art.
Great Book, a few flaws.......1998-02-09
Good sharp, clear rendering of Audubon's 435 Birds. The images appear to be photo offsets of the original Havell prints, including small flaws like spots and tears. No page or image numbers. You have to pencil in your own by using the excellent table of contents at the back of the book. Solid, high quality binding. Excellent addition to any birdwatcher's library.
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- Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
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- Shield of Thunder (Troy Trilogy, Book 2)
- Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
- Suite Française
- The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
- The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (The Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures)
- The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
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