Product Description

It took just three weeks for the second Gulf War to shake the world. Despite public protest and months of international negotiations, the bombs fell on Baghdad. Now, we can see the full picture. Guardian journalists - some of them in the heat of battle, some of them at a more reflective distance around the world - have assembled the story of the most controversial war of modern times. Launched by the mightiest military force on the earth to topple Saddam Hussein, the devastating attack on Iraq brought havoc to the cradle of civilization. It showered horror, pity, death and despair on a people whom history has already burdened with oppression and tyranny. Whether the disorder wrought was justified is for the future to decide. This book is the history of destruction that was the war we could not stop.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #636463 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The War We Could Not Stop is one of the first books about the Iraq conflict to be published since the end of the war and is the result of a collaborative effort by Guardian journalists that seeks to explain the historical background to the war, why it happened when it did and how it finished. Some of the reports come from "embedded" journalists, some from free agents. There are also contributions from American reporters with Arabic speakers from around the region bringing different perspectives.

The first-third of the book in many respects is the most interesting part. Chapter one looks at the 12 years since the first Gulf War, a period that saw a small group of neoconservative American politicians, policymakers and intellectuals--including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice among others--evolve a theory of America's place in the world that had as its first great objective the ousting of Saddam by American military might. Chapters two and three look at the dilemma faced by the United Nations, at Tony Blair's management of the cabinet and his own personal battle to persuade the country of the real and present danger presented by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Chapter four deals with the first few days of the war and the following chapter with the popular opposition to the war in Britain manifested by the largest ever war-time demonstration in Britain's history.

The final two-thirds of the book are dominated by the eye-witness accounts of the war itself. It has the immediacy of first-hand accounts, the balance provided by solid historical background and it reads extremely well--as you'd expect from veteran reporters. Try reading this alongside Dilip Hiro's excellent Iraq: A View from the Inside. --Lary Brown

Customer Reviews

A creditable addition to the growing Gulf War library
This is an edited synopsis of the various levels of reporting undertaken before and during the Second Gulf War by the staff of The Guardian newspaper, currently the UK's only daily broadsheet for the "thinking leftie".

I found it to be unexpectedly sympathetic to the whole enterprise, both US/British and obviously Iraqi, who paid most of the human cost of the war. On this point it is obviously critical of the massive and (despite reports to the contrary from US CentCom spokespersons) largely indiscriminate application of firepower by US and British forces, but maintains an objective perspective on the political situation as a whole.

Presidents Bush and Blair receive a reasonable press as idealists who painted themselves into a corner; the real villains of this piece are the Pentagon hawks (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney et al) who as part of the Project for the New American Century had set upon the course of Saddam's destruction long before George W or Tony Blair even got a sniff of their political hot seats.

It is by the excellent reporting and the obvious immediacy of the narrative that this book distinguishes itself from the usual historical picking over the bones that follows any major conflict. As a snapshot of the period it is excellent; whether it will add anything to the debate of "whether or not we should have gone in" is not really an issue.

Hopefully this will serve as a reference work for the latter type of history books when they come to be written, because the quality and impact of the eyewitness on the spot writing as the events unfold can not be underestimated.