For the Revolutionary generation, silent virtue almost always would be valued more than loud eloquence. - Thomas E. Ricks

difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the major subject of this book. While the Bush administration — and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and L. Paul Bremer III — bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004, blame also must rest with the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counter-insurgency warfare. The undefeated Saddam Hussein of 1991 The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq can’t be viewed in isolation. The chain of events began more than a decade earlier with the botched close of the 1991 Gulf War and then it continued in the U.S. effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the years that followed.

Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond. They

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.