The U.S. in Iraq

Here is a quick summary of two books on U.S. involvement in Iraq:

Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood (Donovan Campbell). Ramadi, Iraq: population, 350,000. Heat waves that top 120 degrees, and a seven month long deployment. You are Marine Officer Lt. Donovan Campbell, Princeton grad and committed Christian, and your company is tasked with keeping schools open, water flowing, and roads clear of IEDs. I bought this book after hearing Campbell on NPR and reading an interview he did with World Magazine, and read it in three days. If you ever feel odd because it feels like our country is not at war, or if you just want to know what it’s like to be an American solider in Iraq, read this book.

The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (George Packer). Packer, now a writer for the New Yorker, that most pretentious of magazines, writes both an autobiographical sketch of time he spent in Iraq covering the first period of the U.S. occupation and a sweeping overview of what strategic mistakes the U.S. made as it failed to win the peace as fully as it won the war. The book was published in 2005, two years before the surge, so many of the criticisms he makes have been righted at this point. The book is best read for its broad overview of the strategic assumptions that drove American policy in first years of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and for its ability to give a visceral feel for what post-Saddam life felt like for many Iraqis.

Churchill and Nixon

Two biographies for your consideration: if you can only read one, read Churchill.

Nixon, vol. I. (Stephen Ambrose). Ambrose is well-known for his military dramas of WWII (Band of Brothers, etc), but he also wrote biographies of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Nixon is possibly the most vilified president of modern times, a man who normalized relations with China, ended the war in Vietnam, and presided over the Watergate scandal. In his first volume, Ambrose tells the story of a remarkably driven man who was elected to the House at 33 years of age, and became Eisenhower’s vice-president just six years later. Nixon would famously lose the 1960 presidential campaign to JFK, and then manage to also lose a gubernatorial bid in his home state of California in ’62. Amazingly, Nixon would rise from the ashes to win the presidency in 1968, completing a comeback unmatched in American political history. The first of Ambrose’s two-volume biography covers Nixon’s life up to 1963. Nixon is a fine summary of the most polarizing president of the 20^th century, and a helpful guide to the essential diplomatic questions of the 1950s. One of the more interesting sections covers Nixon’s work on the House Committee on Un-American Activities with Whittaker Chambers in exposing Alger Hiss in 1948.

Churchill, (Martin Gilbert). Gilbert is the official biographer of Winston Churchill, and, together with Randolph Churchill, has written a massive multi-volume work of W.S.C. The nice thing about Churchill is that it is a one-volume distillation (tho it still runs close to 1,000 pages) of Gilbert’s larger work. Here you get the essential outline of Churchill’s life, and what a life. Paul Johnson has written a much-lauded new biography of Churchill that runs much swifter 200 or so pages, so Johnson’s work might be the place to start. But I can’t believe Churchill could be described in so little space, since even Gilbert is often forced to cut things down to a bare minimum for his volume. To borrow Tom Wolfe’s phrase, Churchill was indeed a man in full.