Preface to the Paperback Edition
I w r i t e t h i s from Baghdad, where George W. Bush’s grand vision for American foreign policy is dying. The life is draining from it day by day, in the tally of thousands of young Americans killed and wounded, in the vast sums of money that American taxpayers are spending with little appreciation from the Iraqis, in the arbitrary detentions of thousands of Iraqis as U.S. forces fight an insurgency they don’t understand. Americans are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Iraq. Yet we cannot show our faces here. When we Americans, we liberators of Iraq, go out in the streets, we must cower in the back of cars to avoid detection. We pretend to be some other nationality to avoid being kidnapped or bombed or shot at by the people we have liberated. The Iraqis who work for us do not tell even their wives and children that they are employed by Americans, so great is the stigma of the botched U.S. occupation. The occupation has lasted, at this writing, less than a year, but it seems as if a generation has come and gone since Iraqis cheered the arrival of American tanks. The Bush administration consciously invited this state of affairs; the president sought to put an all-American stamp on the occupation, disdaining the need for UN or multilateral cover and international