Adrian Weale
Counting the Cost
Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn
Faber & Faber 289pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict
By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes
Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 312pp £20 order from our bookshop
It would be difficult, in recent history, to find a better illustration of the law of unintended consequences than President George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. The underlying fantasy was that a swift and decisive military campaign would be followed by a rapid reconstruction effort, spearheaded by some of America’s finest and most overtly Republican engineering corporations and funded by Iraq’s vast oil wealth. With this achieved, the United States would supervise a political renaissance in the Middle East. Iraq would become an affluent representative of democracy and the dominoes would begin to topple. Democracy and a fairer distribution of oil wealth, protected by the United States’s security umbrella, would pull the rug from under the feet of Arab feudal oligarchs and Islamic fundamentalists alike. After all, who wouldn’t want to live in an ordered, tolerant society that respects its neighbours (like Israel), and where there’s a halal McDonald’s franchise in every air-conditioned shopping mall?
Oh dear. The predictions of Bush, Rummy et al turned out to be no more accurate than the famous remark made by Adolf Hitler just before he unleashed his Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union: ‘We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'This is entertainment of the highest class.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews new thrillers by Mick Herron, Kassandra Montag, @LVaughanwrites, @AuthorSJBolton, @ajaychow, @tombradby, @SaraParetsky, @writejemmawayne & @GillianMAuthor.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/may-2022-crime-round-up
'The day Simon and I Vespa-d from Daunt to Daunt to John Sandoe to Hatchards to Goldsboro, places where many of the booksellers have become my friends over the years, was the one with the high puffy clouds, the very strong breeze, the cool-warm sunlight.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
Some salient thoughts on book collecting from Michael Dirda with a semi tragic conclusion that I suspect many of us can relate to from the @Lit_Review #WednesdayMotivation