Volume 53, Number 13 · August 10, 2006
Mindless in Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor
Pantheon, 640 pp., $27.95
Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco
by David L. Phillips
Perseus, 292 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq
by Fouad Ajami
Free Press, 378 pp., $26.00
Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq
by Michael Goldfarb
Carroll and Graf, 354 pp., $15.95 (paper)
On the evening of March 19, 2003, Marine Lieutenant Therral 'Shane' Childers was part of the first American contingent to cross the Iraq–Kuwait border. His battalion's mission was to secure the key oil installations in the south and it went smoothly. Iraqi army defenses were weaker than expected and the oil wells had not been sabotaged. Childers's platoon easily seized its objective, a pumping station, after which Childers ordered his men into their AAVs (amphibious assault vehicles) in preparation for clearing enemy fighters from the nearby bunkers. In their minutely chronicled account, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, Michael R. Gordon, the chief military correspondent for The New York Times, and Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, describe what happened next:
Review, 4613 words
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