Great summary and review, but I was a bit surprised that while you mention America's missionary impulse and even Star Wars fandom driving this mistake, you didn't give mention to the specific memory of World War 2. A big reason America was so overconfident about its ability to build a liberal democracy from scratch in a short time was that it allegedy did so in both West Germany and Japan very quickly after WW2. WW2 was still "only" as distant then as the 60s are to us today, so its cultural presence was greater -- there were still WW2 veterans in Congress, even. I think the WW2 analogy shows most strongly with "de-Baathification" as a concept -- it's so clearly a rehash of the perceived de-Nazification after WW2, complete with a Nuremberg knock-off for Saddam and other high-level members of his regime.
I'd also point to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (only as distant from 2003 as Obama's Libya intervention is from today), which had mostly successfully turned authoritarian Communist states into functional democracies from Bulgaria to Estonia.
Basically, several standout events in living memory made us inclined toward optimism -- especially since this was also a peak for "blank slate" thinking that didn't consider whether highly developed European societies might fare differently from basically tribal Middle Eastern lands.
A wonderful review--but isn't there an elephant in the room which has gone unmentioned, apparently in the original book, and certainly also in the review? Is it truly plausible that a pseudo-moralistic and intellectually lazy missionary impulse, and an amorphous, over-determined de-centralized (non) decision making process are the sole reasons for a long, trillion dollar and bloody war? Cui bono? Isn't it at least possible, if not extremely likely, that the parties who ended up being the recipients of the trillions of dollars spent by the US on the Iraq War could foresee what a financial and career bonanza this scale of blood-letting would be, and actively steered the Bush Administration towards the fateful decision to start the war? After all, Iraq and much of the Middle East may have been wrecked, but those trillions of Dollars ended up in lots of people's bank accounts and funded some very nice lifestyles in many of the most affluent zip codes in America.
This reminds me of General Wesley Clark’s comments after 9/11, where he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers. You can see him discuss this in the below clip:
This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel's strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq's military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran's growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel's security.
I realize the author is a conservative, but I think pointing to Trump as the person who broke the taboo on calling the Iraq War a disaster in mainstream political discourse is incorrect. Obama beat Hillary Clinton in no small part due to his ability to attack her on her vote for the Iraq War. If the Iraq War doesn't happen but the Financial Crisis still occurs, I think Clinton is highly likely to be the president in 2009. There was a somewhat consistent party id polling gap on support for the Iraq War throughout basically the entire time polling exists on the topic (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/).
I do think that Trump broke the taboo within the mainstream conservative ecosystem, which is still notable, and if you want to be generous, more politically 'brave', given the continuing relative popularity of the war amongst the GOP primary base in 2016.
As a Brit it's delightful to read an American who thinks that the rebels are always the bad guys. Come back into the fold cousins, our King will be merciful to you.
I do love the reviews on this substack, and this review is helpful in pointing at the myriad failures leading up to the Iraq war. But I don't think all of the conclusions you draw follow from this. It reads like you're saying that the foreign policy dichotomy is between self interested realpolitik and naive idealism. But really, the better line to draw is between focused competence, and fuzzy incompetence. Some of the blame for the mess in Ukraine might sit with NATO expansion, but much more sits with Russia's lack of awareness of what would follow their initial invasion, and lack of planning for it. Russia's foreign policy can't be held up as a success.
Of course US idealism has failed (and failed often), and I wish Western countries were a little more clearminded about their own self interested goals. But being the world's policeman has...sometimes been fine.
The Western intervention in the Balkans in the 90s was good, and a Western* intervention in Rwanda might have saved millions of lives and stopped the bloodiest conflict since WW2.
In Syria the counter factual is what if the west had acted decisively in support of the moderates who first rebelled against Assad, rather than leaving them to be crushed between two extremes.
I'm for clear goals, and a moral foreign policy please.
I think this is implicit in your joke, but it's really striking how little the American Revolution and a few others (the Color Revolutions most saliently) have in common with your stereotypical populist revolution. Maybe the thesis should be "rebels can only be the good guys when they have both broad popular support and a legitimate elite ready to step into power".
Does Mazarr even mention Israel? Because they had an axe to grind with Saddam since he bombed them during the Kuwait War and the neocons are big supporters of Israel.
I have long maintained that if Gore had won in 2000 rather than Bush (and he almost did) that he would have also ended up invading Iran. When I present this idea most people scoff at it. But after reading your review, which mentions how strongly Gore supported it and the antipathy already present in the Clinton administration. Add to that the bureaucratic inertia, which would have mostly still been there (though the Dramatis Personae would have been different) and I feel that the situation you describe supports my assertion.
So what does everyone else think? Would the Iraq Invasion still have taken place if Gore was president? I say it would have.
Gore supported the first Iraq war, not the second. He argued against pre-emptive war. Al Gore's speech on Iraqhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq?CMP=share_btn_url
Vindicated in my lifelong hatred of Star Wars. Always thought it was suspicious how all the Empire's technology is designed from the ground up to be easily defeated by a small but determined band of plucky rebels. Also very on the nose how the sequels can't handle peace - afraid to tell a story in which the Republic has to handle the responsibility of peaceful democratic governance - and so just awkwardly resurrect a defeated enemy.
Why are Americans like this though? The Chinese don't, as far as I can tell, want every country in the world to be governed according to Xi Jinping Thought.
I guess the Soviets were evangelical - they encouraged communist movements across the Third World - and people say the neoconservatives were originally Trotskyists. The British introduced parliamentary democracy to a lot of their former colonies. Christians have long been very determined to make other people into Christians. Muslims seem pretty evangelical, they just don't have the political power to throw their weight around on the world stage.
The evangelical mindset is mostly alien to me, but it makes sense that ideologies which make a virtue of actively recruiting new followers would be more successful than ones that didn't.
I think as a non-American it's difficult to keep in mind the degree to which they actually take seriously all that stuff about the Revolution and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and so on. Christians and Muslims and Communists I get, but I always struggle to remind myself that the Yanks, as the first modern democracy, can be just as persistent and dogmatic about their liberal ideas as any Wahhabist or Trotskyist.
Partly of course this is because I grew up in the shadow of the Iraq War, which massively discredited liberal evangelism by using it as the basis for an obviously insane military project. Easy to forget now how completely it changed the intellectual landscape.
Much accurate but much inaccurate or rather the company line, what people pretend is true rather than was really true. First, everyone new it would be a disaster to topple the government. We were discussing this in our think tank faculty rooms, that iraq would break into pieces. They had plans to invade iraq even before the idea of “lets say they had wmd’s” entered their heads.
The US went into a negative cycle during the genocide in Vietnam. You need to revisit the history of the 60s and 70s, if you didnt live through it. Though i appreciate that you just dont want to accept the Dick Cheney is evil line, you should. What is evil if not violent sociopathy for the pursuit of power and wealth? I think your greatest omission in this is to ignore the economics, they made a huge amount of money in these wars, personal as well as corporate transfers of wealth. The US exports instability as it drives weapon sales and increases the price of oil in which many of these individuals are heavily invested. To view foreign policy in terms of political ends is to create a very incomplete picture. They are just good at selling alternative narratives. Lets face it, the US loves dictators, just not dictators that don’t tow the company line.
What i want to end this with is that the invasion of Iraq was no mistake nor a failure for those that orchestrated it. It was incredibly successful in making many people a whole lot of money.
Your aside about Trump's first election springing up from calling out the Iraq War reminded me of Greer! I remember he tweeted something like "Elite support of the Iraq War permanently broke that elite's credibility, and anyone who claims they can lead the country better than what's going on now must first explain where they were and what they were saying in 2002."
To be fair to the people at the time -- we know now that 9/11 was a "one of".; they did not know that. (In fact, I have heard an Arab scholar argue that 9/11 was too successful; it stopped any further Islamist attacks -- because in the Islamist world, the next attack would have had to have been bigger, and that was impracticable).
Underlying this is the situation that US/Western "intelligence" was not up to the job. They did not know the true status of nuclear weapons in Iraq -- just like those intelligence agencies were surprised by the collapse of the USSR or by Russia's reaction to NATO expansion. If there is an action item from this story, it is that the existing "intelligence" agencies need to be levelled and then replaced with something that works better.
As to the Iraqi nuclear weapons story, we forget that the assertion about those weapons was only one of about 16 different justifications given for the attack. The bureaucracy treated the criticisms of Iraq as if they were arraigning Al Capone -- if we can't get him on murder charges, at least we can get him on tax evasion. That kind of shotgun approach may work in the vile US "legal" system, but it is no way to run foreign policy.
And let's remember that Saddam had already invaded three countries -- Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Arguably, Saddam himself was the weapon of mass destruction. If he had been left alone, no-one knows where it would have ended up. Just like no-one can say what would have happened if the Allies in the 1930s had reacted forcefully after Hitler went into the Sudetenland. Removing Saddam was justifiable -- doing it without a plan for what to do next was not.
> Naturally, they thought, if you remove all restraints of force and power from a populace, they will spontaneously generate a parliamentary democracy and immediately ally themselves with the foreign power that just invaded them, right? (The only evidence we have against that proposition is…all of human history.)
I'm more sympathetic to the proposition than you are. Germany and Japan didn't have much in the way of durable democratic institutions prior to World War II, we traumatized and occupied them, and now they're among the best examples of stable US-aligned democracies. You could include South Korea in that pattern as well, though the story there is less cut-and-dried.
Granting that there are many differences between those situations and Iraq (or Afghanistan or Vietnam), you still need some kind of theory of how those differences matter more nuanced than "overthrowing a dictator, invading and occupying a foreign country, and strong-arming them into setting up a parliamentary democracy never works"... because it sometimes does.
Germany and Japan did not have much experience with democratic practice prior to US occupation, but they had a little experience, and that experience was fairly recent as of the beginning of the occupation-you cannot say either of those things about Iraq in 2003. The bigger issue is the ‘spontaneously’ part-we went into Germany and Japan expecting to re-engineer political life in those countries. We believed that we had the right to do so and we were prepared to use a fairly heavy hand if necessary. By contrast we went into Iraq without a consensus within the government as to whether we would, could, or should take much of an active role in steering Iraq’s political development. I will also say that it was easier to restructure Germany and Japan according to our preferences because those countries had just suffered catastrophic defeat in a total war. In Iraq we just took out an unpopular and debilitated government. Most of the Iraqi people felt, correctly, that they had not been defeated or conquered by us, which I suspect made it easier for them to ignore us when we told them to do things that they didn’t want to do.
Germany as a whole had had continuous parliamentary elections, relatively independent judges and considerable freedom of speech from 1871 (at the latest) to 1933. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden had had constitutions since the 1820s. Many towns in Germany had had republican constitutions for more than 500 years. It is maybe not utterly surprising that the mechanisms of democracy took better after 1945 in Western Germany than after 2003 in Iraq, though I think the most important factor was the overwhelming number of Allied soldiers stationed without an expiry date all over Germany.
Outstanding review! I usually simply skim such lengthy reviews but after the first few sentences here I was hooked and read it in its entirety. It brought back many unpleasant memories of that time and how we stumbled into taking such a drastic measure with such awful consequences. I agree with Mazarr's assessment of NATO expansion (described at the end of this review), if only it were not already too late to avoid it.
Great summary and review, but I was a bit surprised that while you mention America's missionary impulse and even Star Wars fandom driving this mistake, you didn't give mention to the specific memory of World War 2. A big reason America was so overconfident about its ability to build a liberal democracy from scratch in a short time was that it allegedy did so in both West Germany and Japan very quickly after WW2. WW2 was still "only" as distant then as the 60s are to us today, so its cultural presence was greater -- there were still WW2 veterans in Congress, even. I think the WW2 analogy shows most strongly with "de-Baathification" as a concept -- it's so clearly a rehash of the perceived de-Nazification after WW2, complete with a Nuremberg knock-off for Saddam and other high-level members of his regime.
I'd also point to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe (only as distant from 2003 as Obama's Libya intervention is from today), which had mostly successfully turned authoritarian Communist states into functional democracies from Bulgaria to Estonia.
Basically, several standout events in living memory made us inclined toward optimism -- especially since this was also a peak for "blank slate" thinking that didn't consider whether highly developed European societies might fare differently from basically tribal Middle Eastern lands.
Do you know the story of Saddam Hussein's novels? He spent the last years of his life writing fiction. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/saddams-secret-weapon/
A wonderful review--but isn't there an elephant in the room which has gone unmentioned, apparently in the original book, and certainly also in the review? Is it truly plausible that a pseudo-moralistic and intellectually lazy missionary impulse, and an amorphous, over-determined de-centralized (non) decision making process are the sole reasons for a long, trillion dollar and bloody war? Cui bono? Isn't it at least possible, if not extremely likely, that the parties who ended up being the recipients of the trillions of dollars spent by the US on the Iraq War could foresee what a financial and career bonanza this scale of blood-letting would be, and actively steered the Bush Administration towards the fateful decision to start the war? After all, Iraq and much of the Middle East may have been wrecked, but those trillions of Dollars ended up in lots of people's bank accounts and funded some very nice lifestyles in many of the most affluent zip codes in America.
This reminds me of General Wesley Clark’s comments after 9/11, where he stated that Bush’s neocon team wanted to invade and destroy seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, none of which had anything to do with the supposed 9/11 attackers. You can see him discuss this in the below clip:
https://youtu.be/FNt7s_Wed_4
This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel's strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq's military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran's growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel's security.
I realize the author is a conservative, but I think pointing to Trump as the person who broke the taboo on calling the Iraq War a disaster in mainstream political discourse is incorrect. Obama beat Hillary Clinton in no small part due to his ability to attack her on her vote for the Iraq War. If the Iraq War doesn't happen but the Financial Crisis still occurs, I think Clinton is highly likely to be the president in 2009. There was a somewhat consistent party id polling gap on support for the Iraq War throughout basically the entire time polling exists on the topic (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/).
I do think that Trump broke the taboo within the mainstream conservative ecosystem, which is still notable, and if you want to be generous, more politically 'brave', given the continuing relative popularity of the war amongst the GOP primary base in 2016.
As a Brit it's delightful to read an American who thinks that the rebels are always the bad guys. Come back into the fold cousins, our King will be merciful to you.
I do love the reviews on this substack, and this review is helpful in pointing at the myriad failures leading up to the Iraq war. But I don't think all of the conclusions you draw follow from this. It reads like you're saying that the foreign policy dichotomy is between self interested realpolitik and naive idealism. But really, the better line to draw is between focused competence, and fuzzy incompetence. Some of the blame for the mess in Ukraine might sit with NATO expansion, but much more sits with Russia's lack of awareness of what would follow their initial invasion, and lack of planning for it. Russia's foreign policy can't be held up as a success.
Of course US idealism has failed (and failed often), and I wish Western countries were a little more clearminded about their own self interested goals. But being the world's policeman has...sometimes been fine.
The Western intervention in the Balkans in the 90s was good, and a Western* intervention in Rwanda might have saved millions of lives and stopped the bloodiest conflict since WW2.
In Syria the counter factual is what if the west had acted decisively in support of the moderates who first rebelled against Assad, rather than leaving them to be crushed between two extremes.
I'm for clear goals, and a moral foreign policy please.
*Non French, obviously.
I think this is implicit in your joke, but it's really striking how little the American Revolution and a few others (the Color Revolutions most saliently) have in common with your stereotypical populist revolution. Maybe the thesis should be "rebels can only be the good guys when they have both broad popular support and a legitimate elite ready to step into power".
Does Mazarr even mention Israel? Because they had an axe to grind with Saddam since he bombed them during the Kuwait War and the neocons are big supporters of Israel.
I have long maintained that if Gore had won in 2000 rather than Bush (and he almost did) that he would have also ended up invading Iran. When I present this idea most people scoff at it. But after reading your review, which mentions how strongly Gore supported it and the antipathy already present in the Clinton administration. Add to that the bureaucratic inertia, which would have mostly still been there (though the Dramatis Personae would have been different) and I feel that the situation you describe supports my assertion.
So what does everyone else think? Would the Iraq Invasion still have taken place if Gore was president? I say it would have.
Gore supported the first Iraq war, not the second. He argued against pre-emptive war. Al Gore's speech on Iraqhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/23/usa.iraq?CMP=share_btn_url
Vindicated in my lifelong hatred of Star Wars. Always thought it was suspicious how all the Empire's technology is designed from the ground up to be easily defeated by a small but determined band of plucky rebels. Also very on the nose how the sequels can't handle peace - afraid to tell a story in which the Republic has to handle the responsibility of peaceful democratic governance - and so just awkwardly resurrect a defeated enemy.
Why are Americans like this though? The Chinese don't, as far as I can tell, want every country in the world to be governed according to Xi Jinping Thought.
I guess the Soviets were evangelical - they encouraged communist movements across the Third World - and people say the neoconservatives were originally Trotskyists. The British introduced parliamentary democracy to a lot of their former colonies. Christians have long been very determined to make other people into Christians. Muslims seem pretty evangelical, they just don't have the political power to throw their weight around on the world stage.
The evangelical mindset is mostly alien to me, but it makes sense that ideologies which make a virtue of actively recruiting new followers would be more successful than ones that didn't.
I think as a non-American it's difficult to keep in mind the degree to which they actually take seriously all that stuff about the Revolution and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and so on. Christians and Muslims and Communists I get, but I always struggle to remind myself that the Yanks, as the first modern democracy, can be just as persistent and dogmatic about their liberal ideas as any Wahhabist or Trotskyist.
Partly of course this is because I grew up in the shadow of the Iraq War, which massively discredited liberal evangelism by using it as the basis for an obviously insane military project. Easy to forget now how completely it changed the intellectual landscape.
Much accurate but much inaccurate or rather the company line, what people pretend is true rather than was really true. First, everyone new it would be a disaster to topple the government. We were discussing this in our think tank faculty rooms, that iraq would break into pieces. They had plans to invade iraq even before the idea of “lets say they had wmd’s” entered their heads.
The US went into a negative cycle during the genocide in Vietnam. You need to revisit the history of the 60s and 70s, if you didnt live through it. Though i appreciate that you just dont want to accept the Dick Cheney is evil line, you should. What is evil if not violent sociopathy for the pursuit of power and wealth? I think your greatest omission in this is to ignore the economics, they made a huge amount of money in these wars, personal as well as corporate transfers of wealth. The US exports instability as it drives weapon sales and increases the price of oil in which many of these individuals are heavily invested. To view foreign policy in terms of political ends is to create a very incomplete picture. They are just good at selling alternative narratives. Lets face it, the US loves dictators, just not dictators that don’t tow the company line.
What i want to end this with is that the invasion of Iraq was no mistake nor a failure for those that orchestrated it. It was incredibly successful in making many people a whole lot of money.
Your aside about Trump's first election springing up from calling out the Iraq War reminded me of Greer! I remember he tweeted something like "Elite support of the Iraq War permanently broke that elite's credibility, and anyone who claims they can lead the country better than what's going on now must first explain where they were and what they were saying in 2002."
To be fair to the people at the time -- we know now that 9/11 was a "one of".; they did not know that. (In fact, I have heard an Arab scholar argue that 9/11 was too successful; it stopped any further Islamist attacks -- because in the Islamist world, the next attack would have had to have been bigger, and that was impracticable).
Underlying this is the situation that US/Western "intelligence" was not up to the job. They did not know the true status of nuclear weapons in Iraq -- just like those intelligence agencies were surprised by the collapse of the USSR or by Russia's reaction to NATO expansion. If there is an action item from this story, it is that the existing "intelligence" agencies need to be levelled and then replaced with something that works better.
As to the Iraqi nuclear weapons story, we forget that the assertion about those weapons was only one of about 16 different justifications given for the attack. The bureaucracy treated the criticisms of Iraq as if they were arraigning Al Capone -- if we can't get him on murder charges, at least we can get him on tax evasion. That kind of shotgun approach may work in the vile US "legal" system, but it is no way to run foreign policy.
And let's remember that Saddam had already invaded three countries -- Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Arguably, Saddam himself was the weapon of mass destruction. If he had been left alone, no-one knows where it would have ended up. Just like no-one can say what would have happened if the Allies in the 1930s had reacted forcefully after Hitler went into the Sudetenland. Removing Saddam was justifiable -- doing it without a plan for what to do next was not.
> Naturally, they thought, if you remove all restraints of force and power from a populace, they will spontaneously generate a parliamentary democracy and immediately ally themselves with the foreign power that just invaded them, right? (The only evidence we have against that proposition is…all of human history.)
I'm more sympathetic to the proposition than you are. Germany and Japan didn't have much in the way of durable democratic institutions prior to World War II, we traumatized and occupied them, and now they're among the best examples of stable US-aligned democracies. You could include South Korea in that pattern as well, though the story there is less cut-and-dried.
Granting that there are many differences between those situations and Iraq (or Afghanistan or Vietnam), you still need some kind of theory of how those differences matter more nuanced than "overthrowing a dictator, invading and occupying a foreign country, and strong-arming them into setting up a parliamentary democracy never works"... because it sometimes does.
Germany and Japan did not have much experience with democratic practice prior to US occupation, but they had a little experience, and that experience was fairly recent as of the beginning of the occupation-you cannot say either of those things about Iraq in 2003. The bigger issue is the ‘spontaneously’ part-we went into Germany and Japan expecting to re-engineer political life in those countries. We believed that we had the right to do so and we were prepared to use a fairly heavy hand if necessary. By contrast we went into Iraq without a consensus within the government as to whether we would, could, or should take much of an active role in steering Iraq’s political development. I will also say that it was easier to restructure Germany and Japan according to our preferences because those countries had just suffered catastrophic defeat in a total war. In Iraq we just took out an unpopular and debilitated government. Most of the Iraqi people felt, correctly, that they had not been defeated or conquered by us, which I suspect made it easier for them to ignore us when we told them to do things that they didn’t want to do.
Germany as a whole had had continuous parliamentary elections, relatively independent judges and considerable freedom of speech from 1871 (at the latest) to 1933. Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden had had constitutions since the 1820s. Many towns in Germany had had republican constitutions for more than 500 years. It is maybe not utterly surprising that the mechanisms of democracy took better after 1945 in Western Germany than after 2003 in Iraq, though I think the most important factor was the overwhelming number of Allied soldiers stationed without an expiry date all over Germany.
This is the kind of nuance I was looking for. Thanks!
Wow. Great post. Now I don't need to read the book.
I recommend "Imperial life in the Emmerald City" for a very entretaining and very sad inside account of how ghe Americans fucked up Iraq's occupation.
Outstanding review! I usually simply skim such lengthy reviews but after the first few sentences here I was hooked and read it in its entirety. It brought back many unpleasant memories of that time and how we stumbled into taking such a drastic measure with such awful consequences. I agree with Mazarr's assessment of NATO expansion (described at the end of this review), if only it were not already too late to avoid it.
Brilliant and insightful. And funny! If the book is as good as the review it’ll be good reading.