Finalist for the National Book Award, this is the startling portrait of an Oz-like place where a vital aspect of our government's folly in Iraq played out. In this unprecedented account, the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief, Raviv Chandrasekaran, takes us with him into the Green Zone, headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq. In this bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed...

The attempt in 2004 to draft an interim constitution in Iraq and the effort to enact a permanent one in 2005 were unintended outcomes of the American occupation, which first sought to impose a constitution by its agents. This two-stage constitution-making paradigm, implemented in a wholly unplanned move by the Iraqis and their American sponsors, formed a kind of compromise between the populist-democratic project of Shi'ite clerics and America's

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In most post-conflict countries nongovernmental organizations are everywhere, but their presence is misunderstood. In The NGO Game Patrice McMahon investigates the unintended outcomes of what she calls the NGO boom in Bosnia and Kosovo. Using her years of fieldwork and interviews, McMahon argues that when international actors try to rebuild and reconstruct post-conflict countries, they often rely on and look to NGOs. Although policymakers and scholars...

I feel that I have been sleeping all my life and I have woken up and opened my eyes to the world. A beautiful world! But impossible to live in.

These are the words of fifteen-year-old Hadiya, blogging from the city of Mosul, Iraq, to let the world know what life is really like as the military occupation of her country unfolds. In many ways, her life is familiar. She worries about exams and enjoys watching Friends during

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"On the October 7, 2001 American and British forces began to bomb the Taliban's positions in Afghanistan. On November 14, 2001, the nation's capital Kabul fell and the war appeared to be over. Afghanistan was liberated. Life quickly resumed to the streets and the victorious parties met in Bonn, Germany to to strike a deal for Afghanistan's future and the establishment of a new Afghan state, which governed on the basis of human rights as well as democratic,...

After a series of disastrous missteps in its conduct of the war, the White House in 2006 appointed General David Petraeus as the Commanding General of the coalition forces. “Tell Me How This Ends” is an inside account of his attempt to turn around a failing war. Linda Robinson conducted extensive interviews with Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and spent weeks with key U.S. and Iraqi divisions. The result is the only book that ties together...

A disgraced kamikaze pilot returns to his obliterated house after witnessing an unbelievable attack on Odo Island. Rebuilding his home and life out of the detritus of the city, he takes in a displaced baby and the woman who found her, creating a family that gives him the courage to bring his neighbors together to fight when the monster returns to Japan while the citizens are already at their lowest point.

America's Destruction of Iraq by Washington insider Michael M. O'Brien details the origins of radical Islamic terrorism now spreading across the Middle East and North Africa. The outgrowth of America's involvement in Iraq, culminating with its March 2003 invasion, is the Islamic State–the most violent terrorist organization in history. Michael O'Brien is an outlier: a conservative and former political appointee in the administration of George W....