Documenting the U.S.-led military campaign in Iraq from the perspective of some of the world's most renowned and respected photojournalists, Witness Iraq offers an extraordinary first-hand account of this controversial war. Beginning with the assassination attempt of Saddam Hussein and continuing through the massive roll out of tanks and troops in the desert, on to the fight of the Kurds in the North, and culminating in the fall of Baghdad, these images, many never-before-seen, reveal both the horrors of war and the triumph of the human spirit. With 150 full-colour photos.
The son of a fighter pilot, raised in an air force barracks, Ahmed Aboul Gheit was privy to the confidential meetings, undisclosed memoranda, and battle secrets of Egyptian diplomacy for many decades. After a stint at military college, he began his career at the Egyptian embassy in Cyprus before later going on to become permanent representative to the United Nations and eventually, Egypt's minister of foreign affairs under Hosni Mubarak. In this fascinating memoir, Aboul Gheit looks back on the 1973 October War and the diplomatic efforts that followed it, revealing the secrets of his long career for the first time. In vivid detail he describes the deliberations of Egypt's political leadership in the run-up to the war, including the process of articulating Egypt's war aims, the secret communications between President Sadat and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the role of the Soviet Union during the war, and the unfolding of events on the battlefront in Sinai. He then gives a detailed and deeply personal account of the arduous process of peacemaking that followed, covering the 1973 Geneva Conference, the 1977 Mena House Conference, Sadat's visit to Israel, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the subsequent 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty. From Sadat's impassioned address to his cabinet on the eve of the war to delegations ripping out the wiring at their respective hotels, from Jimmy Carter cycling through the bungalows at Camp David to Yitzhak Shamir's blunt admissions to his Arab counterparts in the 1991 Madrid conference, Aboul Gheit offers an information-packed, first-person account of a turbulent time in Middle Eastern history.
One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 “The detailed, nuanced, gripping account of that strange and complex journey offered in Robert Draper’s To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq is essential reading—now, especially now . . . Draper’s account [is] one for the ages . . . A must-read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post From the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Certain comes the definitive, revelatory reckoning with arguably the most consequential decision in the history of American foreign policy--the decision to invade Iraq. Even now, after more than fifteen years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper. Draper's prodigious reporting has yielded scores of consequential new revelations, from the important to the merely absurd. As a whole, the book paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. The intelligence failure was comprehensive. Draper's fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective process that arrived at evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false, driven by imagination rather than a quest for truth--evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
In 2014, many people saw images of members of the Yazidi ethno-religious group on television. They sought refuge from Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) militants in the mountains of northern Iraq. Since then, the genocide against the Yazidi minority group has continued. This book will teach students about Iraq and the Yazidis, as well as the violence the Yazidis have faced at the hands of ISIS. As the war against ISIS and the global refugee crisis continue, understanding the plight of the Yazidis in order to work against hatred and discrimination is more important than ever.
As Karen Malpede points out in her introduction to Acts of War, drama "arose as a complement to, perhaps also as an antidote to, war." Like the great ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the playwrights in this volume see the theater as an art form uniquely capable of addressing the effects of warfare. --
From the front line of the Iraq War, the book presents gripping personal stories of Reuters correspondents who capture the mood of the soldiers who fought in the conflict and the ordinary people caught up in it. The Reuters journalists include : Luke Baker, Samia Nakhoul, Andrew Gray, David Fox, Matthew Green, Nadim Ladki, Caroline Drees, John Chalmers, Adrian Croft, Sean Maguire, Mike Collett-White, Christine Hauser, Michael Georgy, Saul Hudson, and Rosalind Russell.
There’s no real homecoming for many of our veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They may go through the motions of daily life in their hometowns, but the terrible sights and sounds of war are still fresh in their minds. This empathic, inside look into the lives of our combat veterans reveals the lingering impact that the longest wars in our nation’s history continue to have on far too many of our finest young people. Basing her account on numerous interviews with veterans and their families, the author examines the factors that have made these recent conflicts especially trying. A major focus of the book is the extreme duress that is a daily part of a soldier’s life in combat zones with no clear frontlines or perimeters. Having to cope with unrecognizable enemies in the midst of civilian populations and attacks from hidden weapons like improvised explosive devices exacts a heavy toll. Compounding the problem is the all-volunteer nature of our armed forces, which often demands multiple deployments of enlistees. This results in frequent cases of post-traumatic stress disorder and families disrupted by the long absence of one and sometimes both parents. The author also discusses the lack of connectedness between civilian society and military personnel, leading to inadequate healthcare for many veterans. This deficiency has been highlighted by the urgent need to treat traumatic brain injuries in survivors of explosions and the high veteran suicide rate. Bouvard concludes on a positive note by discussing some of the surprising and encouraging ways that the chasm between civilian and military life is being bridged to help reintegrate our returning soldiers. For veterans, their families, and especially for civilians unaware of how much our soldiers have endured, The Invisible Wounds of War is important reading.
Presents the findings of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which was formed in 2006 to examine the situation in Iraq and offer suggestions for the American military's future involvement in the region.
