No one who reads this book, however fervent a supporter of the war to topple Saddam Hussein, can avoid concluding that the campaign to make Iraq a better place has been one of the worst planned and executed in American history. George Packer's brutal analyses and trenchant on-the-spot reportage for the New Yorker magazine over the past two years provide the core of this devastating critique. It re-confirms the now familiar but appalling facts: that once the Americans' high-tech military superiority had rapidly overwhelmed Mr Hussein's force in the conventional phase of war, there was, amazingly, no plan whatsoever for the future, beyond a sublime belief in the assurances of a coterie of Iraqi exiles that harmony ("sweets and flowers") would magically replace the dictatorship. It is a tale of arrogance and ignorance, made worse by a blind refusal of those who drove the idea to admit that things were going awry until it was too late.
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