by TerryAnderson (Author)
From journalistic accounts like Fiasco and Imperial Life in the Emerald City to insider memoirs like Jawbreaker and Three Cups of Tea , the books about America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could fill a library. But each explores a narrow slice of a whole: two wars launched by a single president as part of a single foreign policy. Now noted historian Terry H. Anderson examines them together, in a single comprehensive overview. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush told advisor Karl Rove, I am here for a reason, and this is how we're going to be judged. Anderson provides this judgment in this sweeping, authoritative account of Bush's War on Terror and his twin interventions. He begins with historical surveys of Iraq and Afghanistan known respectively as the improbable country and the graveyard of empires, and he examines U.S. policies toward those and other nations in the Middle East from the 1970s to 2000. Then Anderson focuses on the Bush Administration, carrying us through such events as the terrorist's attacks of 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and the siege of Tora Bora, the Axis of Evil speech, the invasion of Iraq and capture of Baghdad, and the eruption of insurgency in Iraq. He ranges from RPGs slamming into Abrams tanks to cabinet meetings, vividly portraying both soldiers in the field and such policymakers as Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. Anderson describes the counter-insurgency strategy embodied by the surge in Iraq, and the simultaneous revival of the Taliban. He concludes with an assessment of the prosecution of the wars in the first years of Barack Obama's presidency. Carefully researched and briskly narrated, Bush's Wars provides the single-volume, balanced history that we have been waiting for.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 312
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 08 Sep 2011
ISBN 10: 0199747520
ISBN 13: 9780199747528
Journalists have given us their take on the conflicts of the George W. Bush era; now Terry Anderson provides the historian's perspective. Essential reading for students and the general public; experts can learn a thing or two as well. - H. W. Brands, author of Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Terry Anderson has written the first comprehensive history of the wars George W. Bush visited upon the world. Read it and weep - Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990