From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a deeply researched and news-breaking investigation into how human error, cultural miscommunication, and hubris led to one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons?

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives by way of his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members, and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader--a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies--even when the stakes were incredibly high.

Calling on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, The Achilles Trap is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy, and vanity--on both sides--led to avoidable errors of statecraft, ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change the political landscape as we know it.

Based on dramatic first-hand evidence, Deadly Betrayal uncovers why and how a cabal of Pentagon Advisors in the George W. Bush Administration created a fabricated justification to attack Iraq.

The book provides a detailed insider account of how a Pentagon cabal strategized to manipulate intelligence, pressure the United Nations, force a Congressional authorization for the use of force through political threats, and scare the American people after 9/11 into supporting an attack on Iraq.

Authored by a Pentagon insider and senior enlisted leader of nearly three decades standing, Command Chief Master Sergeant, Retired, Dennis Fritz worked directly for and advised some of the most senior General Officers in the Department of Defense. They included General Richard B. Myers, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the height of the Iraq War. After military retirement, Fritz found himself inside Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon working for Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and key architect of the case for war. He was detailed to the Pentagon as a contracted Research Fellow and Analyst on a special project to gather and review all Iraqi Pre-War Planning Documents for declassification. His access to thousands of personal handwritten notes, documents, and Pentagon's internal conversations, has allowed him to tell the real story of why America invaded Iraq.

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller, now in paperback! Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard reveal the startling, dramatic story of the global war against terrorists.

As the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and a small group of passengers fought desperately to stop a third plane from completing its deadly flight plan, America went on war footing. Killing The Killers narrates America's intense global war against extremists who planned and executed not only the 9/11 attacks, but hundreds of others in America and around the world, and who eventually destroyed entire nations in their relentless quest for power.

Killing The Killers moves from Afghanistan to Iraq, Iran to Yemen, Syria, and Libya, and elsewhere, as the United States fought Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as well as individually targeting the most notorious leaders of these groups. With fresh detail and deeply-sourced information, O'Reilly and Dugard create an unstoppable account of the most important war of our era.

Killing The Killers is the most thrilling and suspenseful book in the #1 bestselling series of popular history books (over 18 million sold) in the world.

From bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steve Coll, the definitive story of the decades-long relationship between the United States and Saddam Hussein, and a news-breaking investigation into one of the costliest geopolitical conflicts of our time.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons?

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Calling on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, Steve Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, The Achilles Trap exposes how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy, and vanity--on both sides--led to avoidable errors of statecraft, ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change the political landscape as we know it.

After leaving the US Navy SEAL teams in spring of 2017, Ephraim Mattos, age twenty-four, flew to Iraq to join a small group of volunteer humanitarians known as the Free Burma Rangers, who were working on the frontlines of the war on ISIS.

Until being shot by ISIS on a suicidal rescue mission, Mattos witnessed unexplainable acts of courage and sacrifice by the Free Burma Rangers, who, while under heavy machine gun and mortar fire, assaulted across ISIS minefields, used themselves as human shields, and sprinted down ISIS-infested streets-all to retrieve wounded civilians.

In City of Death: Humanitarian Warriors in the Battle of Mosul, Mattos recounts in vivid detail what he saw and felt while he and the other Free Burma Rangers evacuated the wounded, conducted rescue missions, and at times fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Iraqi Army against ISIS. Filled with raw and emotional descriptions of what it's like to come face-to-face with death, this is the harrowing and uplifting true story of a small group of men who risked everything to save the lives of the Iraqi people and who followed the credence, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

As the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestselling American Sniper, Scott McEwen has teamed up with Mattos to help share an unforgettable tale of an American warrior turned humanitarian forced to fight his way into and out of a Hell on Earth created by ISIS.

With a new preface by the author on the Gaza war

An unflinching exposé of the hidden costs of American war-making written with an immense and rare humanity (Naomi Klein) by one of our premier political analysts

Every election cycle, candidates across the political spectrum repudiate what has become one of the most consequential and enduring components of American foreign policy: the forever war. Yet, once the ballots have been cast and the camera crews go home, the American war machine chugs along in almost complete obscurity.

The journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon's War Made Invisible is a gripping and painful study (Noam Chomsky) of the mechanisms behind our invisible, but perpetual, national state of war. From ever-compliant journalists serving as little more than stenographers for the Pentagon to futuristic military technology, horrifying in its destructive power, that makes dropping a bomb or pulling the trigger on a drone strike more of an abstraction than a moral calculation, Solomon's staggeringly important intervention (Naomi Klein) exposes the profoundly human consequences at home and abroad of the bipartisan commitment to war making.

In an era of increasing global instability in which it is all too easy to succumb to despair, Solomon pierces the manufactured 'fog of war' . . . [and] casts sunlight, the best disinfectant, on the propaganda that fuels perpetual war (Amy Goodman). Now in paperback with a new preface by the author on the Gaza war, Solomon's incisive, ever-timely analysis provide[s] the fresh and profound clarity that our country desperately needs (Daniel Ellsberg) now more than ever.

A first person account of the Second Battalion, Seventh Cavalry's participation in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the largest single engagement of the Iraq War and the largest urban battle since Hue in 1968. A First Marine Division operation, it was spearheaded by one of the most famous Army units in history. Ghosts of Fallujah is a heartfelt and somber recount of the battle, the influence of history, personal leadership, and how that can change lives.

Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new pop-culture breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears--soldiers raised on hip hop, video games and The Real World. Cocky, brave, headstrong, wary and mostly unprepared for the physical, emotional and moral horrors ahead, the First Suicide Battalion would spearhead the blitzkrieg on Iraq, and fight against the hardest resistance Saddam had to offer.

Hailed as one of the best books to come out of the Iraq war(Financial Times), Generation Kill is the funny, frightening, and profane firsthand account of these remarkable men, of the personal toll of victory, and of the randomness, brutality and camaraderie of a new American War.

They were stepping into a world of hidden minefields, cultural clashes, green-on-blue insider attacks, and a patient, relentless enemy. But Christopher Izant and the Marines on his team volunteered to train and fight alongside the Afghan National Security Forces despite the risks and a seemingly futile mission they would term advise and abandon made by policymakers a world away.

Final Engagement embeds readers with then-Lieutenant Izant and his team of combat advisors at Combat Outpost Taghaz during one of Operation Enduring Freedom's most crucial and challenging campaigns. It was 2012, southern Helmand Province, and with fixed base-closure and withdrawal timelines, the Marines had only six months to sustain the hard-won victories of the infantry units and prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. But before Border Advisory Team 1 lay down arms, there would be one last deadly battle with a devastating aftermath.

Izant relives a fight in the Afghan borderlands that forebode the fall of Kabul nearly a decade later and confronts the violence and anguish that transformed a generation of American and Afghan warriors from idealist volunteers for a just war to disillusioned veterans of a lost cause.

There are times when military organizations find themselves in a moment of historical significance. This book captures such an event - the capture of Saddam Hussein. The story is told through the eyes of the troopers on the ground working with Army Special Operations Forces. From home station training, deployment, ambushes, and the capture of a dictator, readers will get a glimpse of war in Iraq during the initial stages in 2003. Packed with vivid descriptions, Soldier level challenges, and lessons learned, future leaders will gain a better understanding of how to prepare for and conduct small unit operations in combat. This is a book you must read if you ever have to serve in combat. I lived through many of the experiences described in the book and yet, I could not put the book down.

Thrillingly told by the man who led the unit of hard-pressed Marines, Joker One is a gripping tale of a leadership and loyalty.

Experience the world of private contractors conducting high-threat missions for a nascent Iraqi government in the hopes of rebuilding after the fall of Saddam Hussein. With limited support, the men of Blackwater protected US diplomats as the country descended into sectarian violence. It was a hazardous mission complete with rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and not knowing who or where the enemy was.

Morgan Lerette's irreverently honest memoir shows the good and bad of injecting private armies into active combat zones in the name of diplomacy and digs deep into the bonds of brotherhood created by war. With gut-wrenching tragedy, dark humor, and parties that make Animal House seem like a Disney film, this memoir offers a firsthand perspective on how men act and react in war.

Lerette, a private contractor employed by the notorious Blackwater in the early days of the Iraq War, pulls no punches in calling out the incompetence of both the US military and the Department of State during the collapse of Iraq. You can decide if the insertion of private contractors in Iraq assisted or detracted from the war effort and if the costs in blood and treasure were worth the carnage.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - National Book Award Finalist - This eyewitness history of the first order ... should be read by anyone who wants to understand how things went so badly wrong in Iraq (The New York Times Book Review).

The Green Zone, Baghdad, Iraq, 2003: in this walled-off compound of swimming pools and luxurious amenities, Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority set out to fashion a new, democratic Iraq. Staffed by idealistic aides chosen primarily for their views on issues such as abortion and capital punishment, the CPA spent the crucial first year of occupation pursuing goals that had little to do with the immediate needs of a postwar nation: flat taxes instead of electricity and deregulated health care instead of emergency medical supplies.

In this acclaimed firsthand account, the former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post gives us an intimate portrait of life inside this Oz-like bubble, which continued unaffected by the growing mayhem outside. This is a quietly devastating tale of imperial folly, and the definitive history of those early days when things went irrevocably wrong in Iraq.

America's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 is arguably the most important foreign policy choice of the entire post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades after the event, it remains central to understanding current international politics and US foreign relations.

In Confronting Saddam Hussein, the eminent historian of US foreign policy Melvyn P. Leffler analyzes why the US chose war and who was most responsible for the decision. Employing a unique set of personal interviews with dozens of top officials and declassified American and British documents, Leffler vividly portrays the emotions and anxieties that shaped the thinking of the president after the shocking events of 9/11. He shows how fear, hubris, and power influenced Bush's approach to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. At the core of Leffler's account is his compelling portrait of Saddam Hussein. Rather than stressing Bush's preoccupation with promoting freedom or democracy, Leffler emphasizes Hussein's brutality, opportunism, and unpredictability and illuminates how the Iraqi dictator's record of aggression and intransigence haunted the president and influenced his calculations. Bush was not eager for war, and the decision to invade Iraq was not a fait accompli. Yet the president was convinced that only by practicing coercive diplomacy and threatening force could he alter Hussein's defiance, a view shared by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other leaders around the world, including Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector. Throughout, Leffler highlights the harrowing anxieties surrounding the decision-making process after the devastating attack on 9/11 and explains the roles of contingency, agency, rationality, and emotion. As the book unfolds, Bush's centrality becomes more and more evident, as does the bureaucratic dysfunctionality that contributed to the disastrous occupation of Iraq.

A compelling reassessment of George W. Bush's intervention in Iraq, Confronting Saddam Hussein provides a provocative reinterpretation of the most important international event of the 21st century.

In this epic thrill ride filled with triumph and tragedy, Jack Treadway takes readers deep into the shadows of covert warfare. As a new SEAL learning to hunt men, a clandestine mini wet submarine comes within inches of slicing and dicing him. In SEAL Team Five, he shuffles through a vomit-spewed C-130 transport plane to jump into something worse--a treacherous snowy mountain in the Korean peninsula. Then he breaks his back in a Special Mission Unit assignment and breaks away from the SEAL Teams.

Jack stalks deeper into the darkness from SEAL to Office of Special Investigations (OSI) counterintelligence officer in Iraq. His most elusive prey is a high value target on the kill or capture list--an al Qaeda financier codenamed Kaiser Soze. Jack and his team remove more than a hundred enemy insurgents from the battle space. When a high-ranking Iraqi ally--who secretly works for Iran--kills three members of Jack's team, he wants bloody revenge.

In this sharp, challenging memoir, Col Seth Folsom lays bare the complexities of modern military combat advisor missions at the twilight of America's longest war. Nothing Here Worth Dying For tells the story of his command of Task Force Lion--a purpose-built combat advisor team--and his frenetic 2017 deployment to Iraq's Al Anbar Province. Charged with the daunting task of advising, assisting, and enabling the Iraqi Security Forces in their fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Folsom and his team of Marines and sailors struggled to support their Iraqi partners in the Jazeera Operations Command while simultaneously grappling with their own leadership for their relevance on the battlefield.

Nothing Here Worth Dying For is the jarring coda to Folsom's nearly thirty years in uniform--the last twenty of which he spent deploying to the long war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Far from a jingoistic tale that celebrates Corps and Country, this work challenges many of the popular assumptions about military command, leadership, loyalty, and teamwork.

As with the author's previous books, Nothing Here Worth Dying For focuses on individual Marine actions at the tactical and operational levels while also addressing regional events that contributed to the overall narrative of the U.S. war in Iraq. Folsom describes his unpopular decision to prioritize his team members and their mission to support the Iraqi army above the desires of his own military service branch. As the final operation against ISIS in western Al Anbar gained steam, he questioned the wisdom of the military leadership to which he had dedicated his entire adult life. Despite his disillusionment, he committed himself to the men and women under his command who fought against the odds to accomplish a crucial mission. At its core, this is a story about teamwork and the bonds that develop when men and women risk their lives and reputations together. As the United States struggles once more to extricate itself from Iraq, this book will be a timely addition to the existing body of work about the war.

The captivating (Military Times) The Prisoner in His Palace invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Shortly after being deployed to Iraq, they learn their assignment: guarding Saddam Hussein in the months before his execution.

Living alongside, and caring for, their high value detainee and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions--about the judicial process, Saddam's character, and the morality of modern war. Although the young soldiers' increasingly intimate conversations with the once-feared dictator never lead them to doubt his responsibility for unspeakable crimes, the men do discover surprising new layers to his psyche that run counter to the media's portrayal of him.

Woven from firsthand accounts provided by many of the American guards, government officials, interrogators, scholars, spies, lawyers, family members, and victims, The Prisoner in His Palace shows two Saddams coexisting in one person: the defiant tyrant who uses torture and murder as tools, and a shrewd but contemplative prisoner who exhibits surprising affection, dignity, and courage in the face of looming death.

In this thought-provoking narrative, Saddam, known as the man without a conscience, gets many of those around him to examine theirs. A singular study exhibiting both military duty and human compassion (Kirkus Reviews), The Prisoner in His Palace grants us a behind-the-scenes look at history that's nearly impossible to put down...a mesmerizing glimpse into the final moments of a brutal tyrant's life (BookPage).

From Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Rick Atkinson (Liberation Trilogy) comes an eyewitness account of the war against Iraq and a vivid portrait of a remarkable group of soldiers.

A beautifully written and memorable account of combat from the top down and bottom up as the 101st Airborne commanders and front-line grunts battle their way to Baghdad.... A must-read.--Tom Brokaw

For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003. For Rick Atkinson, who would spend nearly two months covering the division for The Washington Post, the war in Iraq provided a unique opportunity to observe today's U.S. Army in combat. Now, in this extraordinary account of his odyssey with the 101st, Atkinson presents an intimate and revealing portrait of the soldiers who fight the expeditionary wars that have become the hallmark of our age.

At the center of Atkinson's drama stands the compelling figure of Major General David H. Petraeus, described by one comrade as the most competitive man on the planet. Atkinson spent virtually all day every day at Petraeus's elbow in Iraq, where he had an unobstructed view of the stresses, anxieties, and large joys of commanding 17,000 soldiers in combat. And all around Petraeus, we see the men and women of a storied division grapple with the challenges of waging war in an unspeakably harsh environment.

With the eye of a master storyteller, a brilliant military historian puts us right on the battlefield. In the Company of Soldiers is a compelling, utterly fresh view of the modern American soldier in action.

Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The best account yet of the entire war. --Vanity Fair

The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq

Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account--explosive, shocking, and authoritative--of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.