Michiko Kakutani
[Diamond's] book not only provides an unsettling account of the mind-boggling challenges involved in trying to bring democracy to Iraq (ranging from practical matters like setting up an infrastructure for the electoral process to political and philosophical issues dealing with the drafting of a constitution) but also lays out a thoughtful, pull-no-punches analysis of the missteps and misjudgments by the Bush White House and the Pentagon in the months before and after America's toppling of Saddam Hussein.
It is a book that should be read by anyone interested in understanding why the United States' quick military victory has given way to an increasingly virulent insurgency and nearly daily reports of car bombings and suicide attacks, why even post-election hopes have been shadowed by worries about the continuing violence spiraling into a Lebanon-style civil war.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
When Diamond got a call from his former Stanford colleague Condoleezza Rice asking if he would go to Baghdad to advise Iraqi authorities on drafting and implementing a democratic constitution, the political scientist, who had "opposed going to war but supported building the peace," was able to overcome his concerns about the region's instability. What he saw in Iraq during the first four months of 2004, however, left him extremely pessimistic about the prospects of success (although he admits all is not necessarily lost). Diamond sees a refusal to deal honestly with deteriorating conditions, particularly the rise of violent insurgency, and characterizes it as one of America's worst blunders ever; indeed, he calls that refusal "criminal negligence." Diamond's mounting personal frustration becomes apparent especially in direct confrontations with then Ambassador Paul Bremer. Though much of the story is given over to wonkish details of power brokering among Iraq's various political, ethnic and religious factions, there are also vibrant particulars of life inside the American compound, where even going out for pizza could be a life-threatening event. Such eye-witness experience bolsters this vivid critique of the current administration's foreign policy cornerstone. Agent, Scott Mendel. (June 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Political scientist Diamond (senior fellow, Hoover Inst., Stanford Univ.) was recruited by his former colleague Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, to advise on the creation of democratic institutions in Iraq. He provides a penetrating account of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) during the critical first four julys of 2004 and its failure to anticipate the threat of insurgency and the need for physical security. Because of Diamond's access to CPA chief Paul Bremer, top UN officials, and cooperative Iraqis, his critique of American policy is convincing and historically valuable. Despite painstaking negotiation over a draft constitution (Transitional Administrative Law) and the best efforts of idealistic Iraqis and Americans, concedes Diamond, he left behind a "black hole of instability." Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/05.] Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Nation-builder Diamond, a liberal denizen of the Hoover Institution, ruefully examines the checkered efforts to make Iraq safe for-America. When fellow Hooverite Condoleezza Rice called on November 11, 2003, to ask Diamond to join the Coalition Provisional Authority and push the handover of power along, he was, well, conflicted; he had opposed going to war in Iraq and had even published an essay arguing "that the greater danger to the United States at the time was not Saddam's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction but our own imperial overreach and the global wave of anti-Americanism that it is already provoking." Still, he regarded building a democratic, lawful Iraq as a sort of least-we-can-do imperative, and so he took the job, regardless of his feelings about "the Bush administration's arrogant, unilateral approach." Once on the ground, he found plenty of other wrong approaches at work, calculated, it seems, to disaffect potential allies. Though administrator Paul Bremer promised that the Iraqi constitution would be written by Iraqis, he was only half-sincere, by Diamond's account: "To a great extent it would be so, even with American advice, but the question was which Iraqis would be drafting the document." (One CPA official remarked that they shouldn't leave the work to "a bunch of people with no particular credentials other than the fact that they won an election." Oh, the irony.) It's not so much that America backed the wrong horse, Diamond suggests, as that there are so many horses to choose from; too, the handover was done so quickly that, he worried at the time, portions of the law seem to have allowed such things as torture (another irony) and pushed a kind offederalism that, many Iraqis felt, worked against the very idea of a unified Iraq and would yield a "dictatorship of minorities."Handover and constitution or no, Diamond foresees rule by "some uneasy, periodically rejiggered, continually crisis-ridden form of the Governing Council coalition" for the near future. Meaning chaos-and, likely, American boots on the ground.
