Book of the Day - The End of Iraq

I tend to read too many books to post whatever one I'm reading on the side of the blog.  Instead, I'll try to post my reactions to those that I'm reading, a microwave review.  Feel free to pose a question or make a point of your own in the comments. 

    

I'm starting off with Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq, just out in paperback in Britain.  Galbraith, son of the liberal Harvard economist who died last year, was the first to uncover the scale of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds during the Anfal ("spoils") campaign in the nineteen-eighties, which culminated in the notorious gassing of the border town of Halabja.  While working on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he travelled through Iraqi Kurdistan, noting the desolation of the landscape and the flattened buildings everywhere. 

After helping organise humanitarian relief for the Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War, when they fled to the mountains after a failed uprising Hussein's forces, Galbraith went on to serve in the Balkans, including a term as US ambassador to Croatia. 

In this book, Galbraith catalogues what he describes as the monumental incompetence with which the war was undertaken, starting at the White House and all the way down.  He describes the issues and process behind the Iraqi constitution, which leaves the Kurds with de facto - and probably soon, declared - independence. The Shia south, in the meantime, is more or less a milder Arab version of Iran's Islamic Republic, run by a patchwork of militias and parties.  The Sunni areas and Baghdad are, as he describes it, a black hole where the insurgency has no visible political leadership while a large and vigorous Al Qaeda presence is in danger of metastasising into a new base for worldwide terrorism. 

The solution now, Galbraith argues, is for the US to withdraw its military to a haven among the grateful people of Iraqi Kurdistan and build up successor states in the Sunni and Shia areas to keep AQ and Iranian influence to a minimum.