Volume IV, Number
Review Essay
Iraq: the Wrong War
Wrongly Fought?
A Review of Recent Literature on Iraq
Dr Albert Palazzo
George Packer, e Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, Faber and Faber, London, 2006,
467 pp.
omas E. Ricks, Fiasco: e American Military Adventure in Iraq, Penguin Books,
Camberwell, 2006, 482 pp.
Bob Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, Simon & Schuster, New York,
2006, 560 pp.
I
n the a ermath of President George W. Bush’s now evidently premature
‘mission accomplished’ speech from the deck of the aircra carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003, journalists, historians and military profes-
sionals released a deluge of literature on the American conduct of the Iraq War.
ese books—such as Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales Jr., e Iraq War:
A Military History (Harvard University Press, 2003); Ray L. Smith and Bing West,
e March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division (Bantam Books, 2003);
Karl Zinsmeister, Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle
