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As the dreadful reality of the Coalition’s defeat in Iraq begins to sink in, one question dominates Washington and London: why? In this controversial new book, award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele provides a compelling challenge to the conventional wisdom that the problem was one of inadequate planning. Bush and Blair, he argues, were defeated from the day they decided to occupy the country. Iraq had enough of foreign armies. Steele describes the memories of centuries of humiliations that have scarred the Iraqi national psyche, creating a powerful and deeply felt nationalism. Drawing on his unique access to senior Western policymakers, Steele shows how the Key players in the occupying coalition failed to inform themselves about this smouldering backhistory of resentment and suspicion, or even to grasp the basic mindset of the people they were attempting to rule, neatly summarised by a young man he meets in Fallujah: "We are Iraqis. Our dignity is more important than our lives."
Having conducted extensive interviews with ordinary Iraqis – Shia, Sunni and Kurd, religious and secular, middle class and poor, Steele shows for the first time how the staging posts of the conflict so familiar to Western newspaper readers were seen by the Iraqis themselves. Turning a searchlight on to the foreign policy establishments of Britain and America, he looks at why they failed to realize that the post -Saddam vacuum would be filled by Islamists, not pro-Western secularists. With the sectarian conflict intensifying, Steele delves in to confidential sources to reveal the processes and arguments which led to Britain effectively handing over control of the South to Iranian backed Shia militias.
Blending vivid reportage, informed analysis and sweeping historical narratives, ‘Defeat’ is the definitive anatomy of an epic catastrophe.
ISBN - 1845116296
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Pages : 304
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