The Long Road to Baghdad - by Lloyd C Gardner (Hardcover)

About the Book

The renowned diplomatic historian looks back at the ideas, policies, and decisions that have led from Vietnam to the Iraq war, and to America's disastrous new role in the Middle East.

Book Synopsis

The renowned diplomatic historian looks back at the ideas, policies, and decisions that led from Vietnam to the Iraq war and to America's disastrous new role in the Middle East

"What will stand out one day is not George W. Bush's uniqueness but the continuum from the Carter Doctrine of 1979 to 'Shock and Awe' in 2003." --from The Long Road to Baghdad

In this stunning new narrative of the road to America's "new longest war," one of the nation's premier diplomatic historians excavates the deep historical roots of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq. Lloyd Gardner's sweeping and authoritative narrative places the Iraq War in the context of U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam, casting the conflict as a chapter in a much broader story--in sharp contrast to the host of recent accounts, which focus almost exclusively on the decisions (and deceptions) in the months leading up to the invasion.

Above all, Gardner illuminates a vital historical thread connecting Walt Whitman Rostow's defense of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, Zbigniew Brzezinski's renewed attempts to project American power into the "arc of crisis" (with Iran at its center), and, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the efforts of two Bush administrations, in separate Iraq wars, to establish a "landing zone" in that critically important region.

Far more disturbing than a reckless adventure inspired by conservative ideologues or a simple conspiracy to secure oil (though both ingredients were present in powerful doses), Gardner's account explains the Iraq War as the necessary outcome of a half-century of doomed U.S. policies.

About the Author

Lloyd C. Gardner is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Long Road to Baghdad, Three Kings, The Road to Tahrir Square, and Killing Machine, and a co-editor, with Marilyn B. Young, of The New American Empire and Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, all published by The New Press. He lives in Newtown, Pennsylvania.