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General entries
Oil, Power & Empire — Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda 2 November 04
Section: article
Categories: Mention
I recently finished reading this powerful book which someone on the U.S. west coast sent me anonymously — thanks.
Oil, Power & Empire — Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda analyzes the history of Iraq beginning with its creation by the British in 1921. The book is brilliantly written and meticulously footnoted.
One thing that particularly stands out in the book is the vicious continuity of U.S. policies regardless of what political party happens to be in power, at least from the point of view of the many victims of those policies. Under the Clinton administration, for example, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, died directly due to the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq.
A comment by Daniel Ellsberg and two links
This remarkable account of the trajectory of U.S. and U.K. policy towards Iraq — from its founding as a British colony after World War I to the immediate present — is brilliantly illuminating, in an almost literal sense. It’s as if the author had suddenly turned on the lights in the dark cellar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Highly readable, studded with cogent, often startling quotations, the story is at the same time soberly told, factual, and horrifying: but above all, enlightening. I can’t recommend it too highly, for the many struggling to fathom how America came to the present calamitous role of occupying Iraq against local resistance.
—Daniel Ellsberg, author of:
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
- Title: Oil, Power & Empire — Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda
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