Two of the most tired mantras lately have been that we waged a war of imperialism in Iraq, based on lies and aimed at profit, and, second, that like a decadent Rome we are in, and deserve to be in, an abrupt decline. For the antidote, read Thomas Madden’s Empires of Trust, that explains how Romanization introduced a system of merit, law, and trust among millions of disparate people, whose lives were radically improved, and how that legacy, not militarism, is the real parallel to an American-led Westernization in trade, commerce, and interstate relations.

No one has been more villified than Douglas Feith (whom I have never met), and one would have expected, as in the case of all the other Iraq exposés, that he would use the memoir genre to get even. Instead (I’m only half through his War and Decision) he is self-critical, even admits to occasional hubris, but, more importantly, also chronicles the contortions and reinventions of so many post-2003/4 critics of the war, and how Sec. Rumsfeld and company, in fact, discussed in detail in 2003, and often anticipated, many of the later problems of the occupation. We forget that many of the things that went wrong were due to the very policies of those who now orphan them and attribute their lapses to others, who in fact argued against them. There are also good criticisms of the administration’s incompetence in communicating to the public what we were doing in Iraq — and indeed what the war on terror was about and what it was for.

One final note. This is the one of the very few accounts of the war where we are spared the imaginary conversation that is mysteriously related verbatim; and there is very little of the Cobra II/Fiasco/Woodward use of a devastating critique attributed to a specific, but always anonymous “senior Pentagon official”, or “knowledgable high-ranking diplomat”— whose veracity can never be checked.