Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East, from the Vietnam War to the Present by LLoyd C. Gardner

From the Publisher

The long view-reaching back to Vietnam—of the ideas, policies, and decisions that led to the Iraq War.

Publishers Weekly

Rutgers historian Gardner (Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam) makes a convincing case for the parallel between the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The cold war American policy of containment, rather than military force, to discourage Soviet aggression seemed cowardly to early neoconservatives convinced that America should actively seek to defeat communism and replace it with free-market democracy. Gardner names Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, as father of this theory of "creative destruction," which he believed justified America's war against Communist forces in Vietnam. Rostow's eloquent exhortations to persist in a failing war foreshadow those of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on "staying the course" in Iraq. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, neocons turned to the Middle East, although Iran was initially the major villain. The first President Bush refused to occupy Iraq after the Gulf War, but Gardner points out that by demonizing Saddam Hussein as a Hitlerian monster secretly building nuclear weapons, he provided justification for the second President Bush's 2003 invasion. This well-argued study gives a sharp historical and intellectual framework for understanding the current Iraq war. (Oct.)

Elliott Sparkman Walker - Library Journal

In this meticulously detailed analysis, Gardner (Research Professor of History, Rutgers Univ.; Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam) finds the seeds of the second Gulf War in two festering national security wounds from the 1970s: Vietnam and the Iranian Revolution. The Shah's fall cost America a reliable ally (in Gardner's lexicon, a "landing zone") in the region and left a sworn enemy astride the world's second-richest oil reserves. Iraq, with its own vast reserves as well as its own baggage, became America's sometime ally and strategic counterweight to Iran. For neoconservatives (who began demanding regime change in Iraq immediately after the first Gulf War), Iraq would also be the antidote to Vietnam: "a test to see if Americans had the stomach to prevail over its enemy." The depiction of an America with something to prove and something to protect (access to oil) informs Gardner's nuanced exploration of the shifting justifications for the war; the turn away from al-Qaeda, toward Iraq; and the march, led by Vice President Cheney, toward a more imperial presidency. President Bush says only history can judge this war; in this deeply sourced and essential volume, history is none too pleased. Recommended for all libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Precise narrative connects the dots between Vietnam and Gulf War II, primarily from a political and diplomatic perspective. Gardner (History/Rutgers Univ.; Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, 1995, etc.) combines a keen grasp of sprawling subject matter with a non-ideological stance (though he's impatient with foolish politicians) and a controlled, accessible writing style that's sometimes even droll. While many observers claimed the Cold War's end also meant "the end of history," he takes a more jaundiced, long-term view: "Despite the shock of 9/11 . . . both Gulf Wars were long in the making." Gardner argues that the architecture for America's current situation derives from the Vietnam era, in terms of the elevated goals our government often has for armed interventions relative to what actually transpires. He bolsters this claim by examining the careers of key statesmen, including national-security advisors Walt Rostow, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. The author tracks how these individuals responded to their presidents, the military and other factors in translating passionately held views into policies with unpredictable ramifications. Rostow, progressive in many ways, saw the communist threat in Asia as paramount and yearned for a conventional war (instead of a counterinsurgency) to deliver an emphatic "knockout blow" to this ideology. Brzezinski correctly predicted that Afghanistan would be the USSR's Vietnam, but he misjudged the devastating blowback from the Carter administration's support for Iran's hated shah. Scowcroft and the first President Bush, foreign policy "realists," judiciously addressed the first Gulf War yet set the stage for America'scurrent disastrous involvement. Throughout, Gardner weighs how the historical bogeyman of the Cold War conflicted with domestic political concerns to cause perpetual shortsightedness regarding the Middle East in general and the threat of non-state terrorism in particular. He gradually builds to a devastating conclusion: that the second Iraq war transformed the military, "with consequences that changed the very conception of a citizen army in a democracy, raising questions about whether the new military could be controlled by civilian authority."A vital primer to the slow-motion conflagration of American foreign policy.

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