By Michael Schwartz
In this razor-sharp analysis, TomDispatch.com commentator Michael Schwartz turns every mainstream conclusion about Iraq on its head. He shows how U.S. occupation is fueling civil war in Iraq and beyond, and how U.S. officials dismantled the Iraqi state and economy, helping to destroy rather than rebuild the country.
In a popular style reminiscent of the best writing against the Vietnam War, he punctures the myths used to sell the American public on the idea of an endless "war on terror" centered in Iraq. Schwartz shows how the real U.S. interests in that country were rooted in the geopolitics of oil and the expansion of a neoliberal economic model in the Middle East -- and around the globe -- at gunpoint.
War Without End also reveals how the failure of the United States in Iraq has forced American planners to fundamentally rethink the imperial dreams driving recent foreign policy.
This book is the third in a series of very successful books published in cooperation with TomDispatch.com, including the New York Times bestseller United States v. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega (Seven Stories Press).
"Michael Schwartz pushes beyond 'Iraq fatigue' to paint a big, bold picture of the geopolitical forces that brought us to war, then fills in the details with heart-breaking description of the human reality of occupation. A courageous contribution from one of the best Iraq analysts writing today."
-- Naomi Klein, author, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
"The best history of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that I've seen. This book puts incidents of violence we hear about in the context of the massive violence we don't hear much about, and puts all of it in the context of the economic and social devastation imposed on Iraq by the people we absurdly call our public servants."
-- David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org
"Informed, cogent, and sharply analytical, Michael Schwartz probes aspects of the war in Iraq that are usually ignored. Read this book to know how total the catastrophe really is."
-- Frances Fox Piven, author, The War at Home
"Americans have all along needed a sociologist, not a general, to help them understand Iraq. They need to know about social movements, not just militias, and about oil politics, not just personalities in the news. We have the incredible good fortune that the perspicacious Michael Schwartz boldly stepped forward to cast floods of illumination on the Iraq War and its tragic social costs."
-- Juan Cole, Informed Comment
"As a radical American sociologist, Michael Schwartz continues the critical and committed tradition best illustrated by C. Wright Mills half a century ago. In the so-called 'Information Age,' Schwartz remarkably shows that, even for a country so far away from the United States and as opaque and out of reach as Iraq is, critical intellectuals can gather enough information through the Internet to exert their duty as citizens. They can read into the actual policies of their government and decipher the hypertext of its hypocritical statements in order to alert their fellow citizens to the horrors perpetrated in their name. This book is Michael Schwartz's own equivalent of C. Wright Mills's Listen, Yankee, based on virtual forays into Iraq and an acute grasp of the machinery of U.S. empire."
-- Gilbert Achcar author (with Noam Chomsky), Perilous Power
