No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos

Front Cover
PublicAffairs, Feb 23, 2009 - History - 672 pages
The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, No End In Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness, and venality.

Culled from over 200 hours of footage collected for the film, the book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials, Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. Together, these voices reveal the principal errors of U.S. policy that largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today -- and what we could and should do about them now.

No End In Sight marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad's Green Zone to understand for themselves the disintegration of Iraq -- and how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.

From inside the book

Contents

PART 1 PREPARATION AND INVASION
1
ONE War 3
3
TWO Prewar Planning 24
24
THREE ORHA 71
71
FOUR The Looting 104
104
PART 2 OCCUPATION
139
FIVE Bremer Begins 141
141
The Disbanding of the Iraqi Military 163
163
PART 3 WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
407
ELEVEN Consequences 409
409
TWELVE Current and Future US Policy in Iraq 463
463
EPILOGUE Reflections 517
517
Acknowledgments 565
565
A Brief History of Iraq before the War 569
569
Timeline of the War in Iraq 577
577
Contributors and Key Actors 587
587

SEVEN The Police Crime and the Security Vacuum 234
234
EIGHT The Civilian Occupation and the CPA 266
266
NINE Insurgency Militias and Sectarian Violence 312
312
TEN The Military Occupation 370
370
Statistical Graphs 617
617
Index 629
629
About the Author 641
641
Copyright

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Page 31 - First, it's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
Page 5 - My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger...

About the author (2009)

Charles Ferguson is director and producer of No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq, which is his first film. A political scientist and strategic consultant, Ferguson co-founded one of the earliest Internet software companies, Vermeer Technologies, which he eventually sold to Microsoft. Ferguson is a visiting scholar of political science at MIT and UC Berkeley, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a director of the French-American Foundation. He is the author of three books on information technology.

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