Book Review: America's War for the Middle East

I just finished one of the clearer-eyed histories of what has been going on in the Middle East for the last 30 years.   It puts back together all of the fragmented pieces and inaccurate narratives into a comprehensive and coherent description of the chain of events (and errors) that got the US where it is today in the Middle East.


America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History by Andrew J. Bacevich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An excellent and well-researched history of the continuous war the US has been waging or preparing to wage in the Middle East since the 1980s.

Due to political expediency or media convenience and abetted by the constant American need to keep regularly declaring victory lest the populace withdraw its support it is common to think (and write) of the ebbs and flows in this conflict as discrete, individual actions or campaigns. In fact, this book lays out the true continuity of this war and how one segment or campaign does little more than lay the groundwork for and sometimes ignite the inevitable next stage.

A very well-written and easy to follow book, and a necessary antidote to the artificial staging that the US government would have the public believe as a series of triumphs. In fact what occurred is a series of failures of diplomacy, strategy, and imagination each with a more ridiculous public "code name" than the past one.

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