Product Description

Many books have already been written about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the War on Terror - how they happened and why, how they've succeeded and failed. "The Forever War" is not that kind of book: rather than argument or hand-wringing, Dexter Filkins offers us a kaleidoscopic tour of the great conflicts of our time. Through his eyes as a reporter on the ground, we witness the events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, led to the September 11 attacks in 2001, and culminated in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins is the only American reporter to have witnessed all these events on his own and close-up - public executions and amputations; the destruction of the twin towers; the collapse of the Taliban in 2001; and, over five years of grinding struggle in Iraq.In this work: we move across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes; we meet Iraqi insurgents and American soldiers - Afghan rebels and Taliban clerics; and, we travel to deserts and glaciers and mountaintops, to the scenes of suicide bombings and into the homes of the bombers themselves. Like no other book, "The Forever War" will provide a visceral understanding of the War on Terror, its victims, and the people who fight it. It will show what war is, what this particular war is, and how it feels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99705 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

Review
'both objective and indispensible ... Intimately moving and harrowing'

Review
`as broad, vivid and unbiased a portrait of Iraq as has yet been written ... a fine, compelling, brilliant book.'

Review
`visceral, evocative and impassioned, reminiscent of the best journalism from a previous American overseas quagmire: Vietnam. It's standard practice in cases such as this to rank the book in question against Michael Herr's classic, Dispatches, and for once the comparison holds up'.

Customer Reviews

Unbiased, informative and thought provoking.
Comparisons between this book and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches' are inevitable as they both share the same snapshot story format. The word 'dispatches' also features in 'The Forever War's' subtitle - which I suspect is no coincidence. As I considered Herr's book to be one of finest books on war ever written and I was keen to read this 21st century version.

'The Forever War' is mostly about Afghanistan and Iraq after the American led invasions, but there are sections prior to that. It's written in a very unbiased manner leaving the reader to draw there own conclusions from the stories involving US troops, insurgents, civilians, politicians and war profiteers. The style of writing is very matter of fact, but rarely dry or dull and never it romanticises war in the way that Herr's book occasionally could. It does an excellent job of showing just how complex the situation in middle east and Iraq in particular really is, however the book points no fingers of blame and is neither anti-war or pro-war in tone.

I would recommend this book to anyone really, whether you agree with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or not. Regardless of your viewpoint reading 'The Forever War' will give all but the most blinkered readers something to think about.

Brilliantly Layered Impressions of Afghanistan and Iraq
The source of THE FOREVER WAR is 561 notebooks that Dexter Filkins filled in a nine year period, when he worked as a correspondent for The Los Angeles Times in Afghanistan and The New York Times in Iraq. In a section of acknowledgements at the end of his book, Filkins thanks Jonathan Segal, his editor at Knopf, who "helped shape my unwieldy ideas and an even more unwieldy manuscript..."

While Filkins is surely being generous, what he and Segal succeed in delivering is a highly layered rendering of Filkins's experiences that both clarifies and conveys the complexity of these failed states. Filkins and Segal, in other words, have managed this mother lode of on-the-scene impressions brilliantly. They have created a book that is highly perceptive, never strident or polemical, and absolutely riveting.

The layering of experience is everywhere in TFW. One quick illustration is Chapter Eight, which focuses on a maternity hospital in Diwaniya that Jerry Bremer visits. This begins with Bremer's advance man, who is a Republican political operative, not an Iraqi expert. Then Bremer exits his Chinook and gives a speech, like a politician campaigning, citing statistics showing that all 200 hospitals in Iraq are open, that the country's health care is improving, and so on. But what Filkins learns from the doctors is that there is no electricity. As a result, the hospital cannot sterilize instruments or warm the incubators and its premature babies are dying. In this and other visits to this hospital, Filkins also finds one employee who hates Saddam more than the American occupation but another who hates the chaos of the occupation more than Saddam. Altogether, this single short chapter shows the effort to manage the story, the reality, and the complex reactions and allegiances of the Iraqis. Throughout, TFW has a very rich narrative.

In TFW, Filkins does many things exceedingly well. But among my favorites is his discussion of the nihilism of the insurgents. In contemplating videos of suicide bombings, he writes:

"The videos made me wonder. What was more important to these guys, the suicide or the murder? You'd think it would be the murder, but I wasn't always so sure; there was a hint of nihilism in everything Al-Qaeda did. At the end of the Palestine-Sheraton video, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia at the time, gave a little speech. He promised victory for the Islamic world and, barring that, annihilation. `If the enemy wins,' Zarqawi promised, `we will burn everything.'" This nihilism is apparent in everything Filkins writes about Al-Qaeda.

Other excellent chapters examine ethic cleansing, IEDs, and the death of Lance Cor-poral William L. Miller. Highly recommended.

Impressions of the American wars in the Near East
Contrary to much that has been and is being written on the Anglo-American (plus coalition) wars and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins' book "The Forever War" is not a political book. That is to say, it deals with political issues of necessity, but it does not make a political argument of any particular kind. Rather, Filkins, a war correspondent for the New York Times, has operated as a tabula rasa on which the war events he witnessed could make their impression, without any preconceived notions or arguments getting in the way.

This has the definite advantage that Filkins does not add to the pile of increasingly irrelevant argumentation about the possibilities of ill-defined "success" in these regions, but rather lets the reader vicariously experience the reality of living and fighting in these war-torn countries. In a way, this is nonetheless a political argument on its own, as despite Filkins' good relations with the American soldiers he joined as an 'embedded reporter', it is clear from his experiences that not much is being achieved by way of either 'nation-building' or establishing lasting security in these countries, indeed the least any occupier with pretentions of superiority could do.

The fact that Filkins does not explicitly make this argument, or any argument, is fairly pleasant in that it lets the experiences speak for themselves in a more subtle manner than newspaper moralizing often permits. However, this book also has clear downsides. Filkins does not give much, if any, background information on the combatant parties involved or even of the countries, other than the absolutely necessary. What's more, his war reporting uses a heavily colloquial style that is very grating initially and makes him seem to 'try too hard' to come off as cool, detached and rough - perhaps this is something that he took over from the Marines he was stationed with, but it does not in my view help the book's readability any. One does get used to it and over the course of the book he gets more serious, but the first few chapters are rather annoying.

The main value of the book is probably the service it does to humanizing the people involved, both of the occupying armies and their opponents. They say that truth is the first casualty of war, but surely the greatest casualty of war is a sense of shared humanity. Indeed it is hard to get any group to fight any other without in some way dehumanizing them first, and all the political argumentation of the world does not suffice of itself to repair a warped view of this kind once it is dominant. What can do so is a vivid description of real people and their human traits and follies. It used to be that literature played this role, but the authority and impact of the writer has diminished; now perhaps journalists can take this over to some extent. Some people combine this with the political argumentation for the greatest possible effect, like Robert Fisk does for example, but even if one leaves out the politics, the experience of humanization alone is very valuable. This is what Filkins' book contributes.