The Iraq Papers will be the most comprehensive and best-organized document collection of America's misadventure in Iraq. The editors have organized the book around the concept of pre-emption, a policy that represented a significant break with past American foreign policy. The editors locate the intellectual origins of pre-emption in neoconservative writings from the early 1990s, and then trace how the logic of pre-emption played out across a number of arenas in the first decade of the twenty first century: the war itself, America's relationship with its allies and the UN, its dealings with Iraqi society and successive Iraqi governments after 2003, and domestic policy in the Bush-era United States. They close with a chapter on the limits of American policy as it moves into the Obama era. There are eleven chapters in total, and ten will feature a representative selection of the most important documents relating to the origins of the war-including prominent writings by early neoconservative advocates for invasion-and the war's impact on Iraq, America, and the world. Covering more than a decade, The Iraq Papers will be a definitive source for anyone interested in understanding this enormously complicated and difficult conflict.
No foreign policy decision in recent history has had greater repercussions than President George W. Bush's decision to invade and occupy Iraq. It launched a new doctrine of preemptive war, mired the American military in an intractable armed conflict, disrupted world petroleum supplies, cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars, and damaged or ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. Its impact on international politics and America's standing in the world remains incalculable.
This collection of documents traces the rise of the neo-conservatives and reveals their strategic thinking about oil supplies. It provides congressional resolutions, speeches by President Bush, internal security papers, Pentagon planning papers and the report of the Future of Iraq Project. It addresses every aspect of the conflict, from the evolving counter-insurgency strategy to statements by Iraqi resisters and political figures from the Coalition Provisional Authority to Donald Rumsfeld and his dismissal of the insurgents as dead enders and Iraqi discussions about nation-building under the shadow of occupation.
