For most prisoners of war in the Second World War, life behind bars was nothing like the films. The tales of brave escape attempts told in accounts such as the iconic film The Great Escape are exciting enough, but how much of the detail is true? In Great Escapes ex-RAF officer and researcher for the RAF Escaping Society Terry Treadwell tells the incredible tales of some of the lesser known attempts to escape POW camps. All the amazing details are from real-life escape attempts, but as this book reveals, fact is often more extraordinary than fiction. Using personal accounts, authentic reports from German guards and debrief documents in the National Archives, Terry Treadwell traces the astounding stories of these heroic escapees. Some were successful, others not, but in each case the inspired methods devised and executed by the prisoners show bravery and ingenuity on a greater scale than any film. With incredible stories such as the Wooden Horse, the French Tunnel and the Colditz Ghost, this ground-breaking new book tells the stories of some of the bravest, and most reckless, men in history.

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

The never-before-told story of one of the most decorated units in the war in Afghanistan and its fifteen-month ordeal that culminated in the 2008 Battle of Wanat, the war's deadliest A single company of US paratroopers--calling themselves the "Chosen Few"--arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides. Month after month, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, and machine-gun fire poured down on the isolated and exposed paratroopers as America's focus and military resources shifted to Iraq. Just weeks before the paratroopers were to go home, they faced their last--and toughest--fight. Near the village of Wanat in Nuristan province, an estimated three hundred enemy fighters surrounded about fifty of the Chosen Few and others defending a partially finished combat base. Nine died and more than two dozen were wounded that day in July 2008, making it arguably the bloodiest battle of the war in Afghanistan. The Chosen Few would return home tempered by war. Two among them would receive the Medal of Honor. All of them would be forever changed.

Counterinsurgency will be the prominent style of American warfare in the 21st century: This has long been a common prediction regarding United States foreign policy and has thus far proven true. Written for those who study counterinsurgency from a policy perspective as well as for those who do counterinsurgency in the field, this book demonstrates that the U.S. has had difficulty meeting the challenges of this special form of warfare because it has not properly processed important lessons from the past. Based on the author's wartime experiences, a broad range of topics are covered - from factors to be considered in accepting a counterinsurgency partner, to "rules" for advisors in the field - with points illustrated by real-life examples.

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A Companion to the Vietnam War "contains twenty-four definitive essays on America's longest and most divisive foreign conflict. It represents the best current scholarship on this controversial and influential episode in modern American history.
Highlights issues of nationalism, culture, gender, and race.
Covers the breadth of Vietnam War history, including American war policies, the Vietnamese perspective, the antiwar movement, and the American home front.
Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic.
Includes a select bibliography to guide further research.

At 5:58 AM on October 3rd, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating, located in frighteningly vulnerable terrain in Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistani border, was viciously attacked. Though the 53 Americans there prevailed against nearly 400 Taliban fighters, their casualties made it the deadliest fight of the war for the U.S. that year. Four months after the battle, a Pentagon review revealed that there was no reason for the troops at Keating to have been there in the first place. In THE OUTPOST, Jake Tapper gives us the powerful saga of COP Keating, from its establishment to eventual destruction, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of soldiers and their families, and to a place and war that has remained profoundly distant to most Americans. A runaway bestseller, it makes a savage war real, and American courage manifest.

This book examines international military interventions that have supported stability in four communities in Afghanistan and Nepal, in an attempt to analyse their success and improve this in future. This is the first in-depth village-level assessment of how local populations conceive of stability and stabilisation, and provides a theory and model for how stability can be created in communities during and after conflict. The data was collected during field research from 2010-12. In Afghanistan the conflicts examined include the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1979, the civil war from 1992 and the rise and fall of the Taliban. In Nepal the research examined the origins of the Maoist movement and the start of the People's War in 1996 to its completion in 2006 and the subsequent Madeshi Andolan in 2007. The book argues that international, particularly Western, notions of stability and stabilisation processes have failed to grasp the importance of local political legitimacy formation, which is a vital aspect of contemporary statebuilding of a 'non-Westphalian' nature. The interventions, across defence, diplomatic and defence lines, have also at times undermined one another and in some cases contributed to instability. The work argues that the theories that structure interventions to address threats to international stability in 'fragile' states are insufficient to explain or achieve the goal of stability. This book will be of interest to students of stabilisation operations, statebuilding, peacebuilding, counterinsurgency, war and conflict studies and security studies in general. Christian Dennys is lecturer at Cranfield University/UK Defence Academy and has a PhD in International Relations.

In November 1965, the air mobile 1st Cavalry Division, led by Lt. Col. Moore and accompanied by reporter Galloway, landed in a remote valley in the central highlands of South Vietnam--and were met by 3,000 seasoned North Vietnamese Regulars. Today, the Ia Drang battle is taught at the U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Army, Navy, and Air Force war colleges. *A moving account of one of Vietnam's most savage battles *A tale of endurance, self-sacrifice and friendship *Based on hundreds of interviews of men who fought there, including North Vietnamese commanders `A gut-wrenching account of what war is really about, which should be a"must" read' - General Norman Schwarzkopf `Between experiencing combat and reading about it lies a vast chasm. But this book makes you almost smell it' - Wall Street Journal `There are stories here that freeze the blood . . . The men who fought at Ia Drang could have no finer memorial' - New York Times Book Review In November 1965, some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under Lt. Col. Hal Moore's command, were dropped by helicopter into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was chopped to pieces. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the Vietnam War's most significant battles. How these men persevered makes a vivid portrait of war at its most inspiring and devastating. General Moore and Joseph Galloway, the only journalist on the ground throughout the fighting, have interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders. This dramatic account presents a picture of men facing the ultimate challenge and dealing with it in ways they would have found unimaginable only a few hours earlier. It reveals to us, as rarely before, man's most heroic and horrendous endeavor. HAROLD G. MOORE is a West Point graduate, a master parachutist, and an Army aviator. He commanded two infantry companies in the Korean War and was a battalion and brigade commander in Vietnam. JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY spent fifteen years as a foreign and war correspondent based in the Far East and the Soviet Union. Now a senior writer with US News& World Report, he covered the Gulf War and co-authored Triumph without Victory.

The incredible true story of Major Bill Shaw, who having survived some of the toughest war zones in the world, was faced with the nightmare of being wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan under a corrupt legal system From surviving a horrific terrorist attack in Northern Ireland, to the violence of the Gulf War and an assault course of harrowing experiences in Iraq, Bosnia, and Columbia, Major Bill Shaw had seen it all. But Bill's strength and courage was tested to its absolute limits when he was arrested for a crime he did not commit. Posted in Afghanistan after two years in Iraq, Bill was responsible for the safety of 400 men in a full-scale danger zone in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The married father and grandfather, who had risen through the ranks to become a commander of men and an MBE, had long accepted that each day could be his last. But he never expected to find his own life at risk under a corrupt legal system. Thrown into prison and forced to share a cramped, vermin-infested cell with sixteen Afghans, among them members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Bill had no idea when, or even if, he would see his family again. This is the incredible true story of a brave soldier who survived some of the toughest war zones in the world only to face the nightmare of being wrongfully imprisoned a very long way from home. Gritty and gripping, this powerful military memoir is an eye-opening account of life on the frontline.

This book narrates the history of the different peoples who have lived in the three major regions of Viet Nam over the past 3,000 years. It brings to life their relationships with these regions' landscapes, water resources, and climatic conditions, their changing cultures and religious traditions, and their interactions with their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia. Key themes include the dramatic impact of changing weather patterns from ancient to medieval and modern times, the central importance of riverine and maritime communications, ecological and economic transformations, and linguistic and literary changes. The country's long experience of regional diversity, multi-ethnic populations, and a multi-religious heritage that ranges from local spirit cults to the influences of Buddhism, Confucianism and Catholicism, makes for a vividly pluralistic narrative. The arcs of Vietnamese history include the rise and fall of different political formations, from chiefdoms to Chinese provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In the twentieth century anticolonial nationalism, the worldwide depression, Japanese occupation, a French attempt at reconquest, the traumatic American-Vietnamese war, and the 1975 communist victory all set the scene for the making of contemporary Viet Nam. Rapid economic growth in recent decades has transformed this one-party state into a global trading nation. Yet its rich history still casts a long shadow. Along with other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Viet Nam is now involved in a tense territorial standoff in the South China Sea, as a rival of China and a "partner" of the United States. If its independence and future geographical unity seem assured, Viet Nam's regional security and prospects for democracy remain clouded.

The Korean War of 1950-1953 ended in a frustrating stalemate, the echoes of which reverberate to this day. It was the only conflict of the Cold War in which forces of major nations of the two opposing systems - capitalism and communism - confronted each other on the battlefield. And yet, in the sixty years since it was fought it has been strangely neglected, perhaps because no one was able to claim the victor's spoils. The War That Never Ended details the origins, battles, politics and personalities of the Korean War - a war that has never ended, and for which no peace treaty was ever signed.

The decade that followed James Stockdale's seven and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison saw his life take a number of different turns, from a stay in a navy hospital in San Diego to president of a civilian college to his appointment as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. In this collection of essays he offers his thoughts on his imprisonment. Describing the horrors of his treatment as a prisoner of war, Stockdale tells how he discovered firsthand the capabilities and limitations of the human spirit in such a situation. As the senior officer in confinement he had what he humbly describes as 'the easiest leadership job in the world: to maintain the organization, resistance, and spirit of ten of the finest men I have ever known.' His reflections on his wartime prison experience and the reasons for his survival form the basis of the writings reprinted here. In subject matter ranging from methods of communication in prison to military ethics to the principles of leadership, the thirty-four selections contained in this volume are a unique record of what Stockdale calls a 'melting experience' - a pressure-packed existence that forces one to grow. Retired Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, a Hoover Institution fellow from 1981 to 1996, was Ross Perot's 1992 presidential running mate and a recipient of the Medal of Honor after enduring seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. He died in 2005 at the age of 81.

This absorbing study casts light on the tactics, weapons and combat effectiveness of the US Marines and North Korean soldiers who fought one another in August and September 1950. Equipped with Soviet tanks and bolstered by a cadre of combat veterans returning from the Chinese Civil War, North Korea's army launched its surprise offensive against the Republic of Korea on 25 June 1950; within days Seoul had fallen and the majority of South Korea's divisions had been shattered. American ground troops rushed to Korea also seemed incapable of stopping the rapidly advancing North Koreans. By August, the remnants of the South Korean and US Army divisions had been pushed into a small corner around the port of Pusan, their backs to the sea. Time was also running out for the North Koreans; virtually all of their planning and preparations were based on a two-month campaign. Although the North Korean People's Army had enjoyed an impressive string of victories, its losses were no longer being replaced in the needed quantity or quality. It was truly a do-or-die moment for both sides. In the wake of World War II, the United States Marine Corps had shrunk from 473,000 men in 1945 to only 70,000 in 1950. Despite its heavily slashed budget and manpower, the Marine Corps responded swiftly and decisively. Active-duty Marines from all over the globe gathered and for once the Marine Corps even received some of the latest American military equipment; it was the Marines' esprit de corps that made the real difference, however. Using first-hand accounts and specially commissioned artwork, this study assesses the KPA and US Marine Corps troops participating in three crucial battles - Hill 342, the Obong-Ni Ridge and the Second Battle of Seoul - to reveal the tactics, weapons and combat effectiveness of both sides' fighting men in Korea in 1950.

The story of one of the Afghanistan war's most decorated units and their fifteen-month ordeal, culminating in the Battle of Wanat, the deadliest battle of the war A single company of US paratroopers - calling themselves the "Chosen Few" - arrived in eastern Afghanistan in late 2007 hoping to win the hearts and minds of the remote mountain people and extend the Afghan government's reach into this wilderness. Instead, they spent the next fifteen months in a desperate struggle, living under almost continuous attack, forced into a slow and grinding withdrawal, and always outnumbered by Taliban fighters descending on them from all sides. Month after month, rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, and machine-gun fire poured down on the isolated and exposed paratroopers as America's focus and military resources shifted to Iraq. Just weeks before the paratroopers were to go home, they faced their last - and toughest - fight. Near the village of Wanat in Nuristan province, an estimated three hundred enemy fighters surrounded about fifty of the Chosen Few and others defending a partially finished combat base. Nine died and more than two dozen were wounded that day in July 2008, making it arguably the bloodiest battle of the war in Afghanistan. The Chosen Few would return home tempered by war. Two among them would receive the Medal of Honor. All of them would be forever changed.

In this vivid account of the U.S. Army's legendary 10th Mountain Division's heroic stand in the mountains of Afghanistan, Captain Sean Parnell shares an action-packed and highly emotional true story of triumph, tragedy, and the extraordinary bonds forged in battle. At twenty-four years of age, U.S. Army Ranger Sean Parnell was named commander of a forty-man elite infantry platoon-a unit that came to be known as the Outlaws-and was tasked with rooting out Pakistan-based insurgents from a mountain valley along Afghanistan's eastern frontier. Parnell and his men assumed they would be facing a ragtag bunch of civilians, but in May 2006 what started out as a routine patrol through the lower mountains of the Hindu Kush became a brutal ambush. Barely surviving the attack, Parnell's men now realized that they faced the most professional and seasoned force of light infantry the U.S. Army had encountered since the end of World War II. What followed was sixteen months of close combat, over the course of which the platoon became Parnell's family. But the cost of battle was high for these men: over 80 percent were wounded in action, putting their casualty rate among the highest since Gettysburg, and not all of them made it home. A searing and unforgettable story of friendship in battle, "Outlaw Platoon" brings to life the intensity and raw emotion of those sixteen months, showing how the fight reshaped the lives of Parnell and his men and how the love and faith they found in one another ultimately kept them alive.

The Korean War, 1950-1953, was the first war in which jet aircraft played a central role. Once-formidable fighters such as the P-51 Mustang, F4U Corsair, and Hawker Sea Fury, relinquished their air superiority roles to a new generation of faster, jet-powered fighters. For the initial months of the war, the P-80 Shooting Star, F9F Panther, and other jets under the UN flag dominated North Korea's prop-driven air force of Soviet Yakovlev Yak-9 and Lavochkin La-9s. The Chinese intervention in late October 1950 bolstered the Korean People's Air Force of North Korea with the MiG-15 Fagot, one of the world's most advanced jet fighters. The fast, heavily armed MiG out flew first-generation UN jets. The United States Air Force moved quickly to counter the MiG-15, with three squadrons of its most capable fighters. Lt. Gen. George G. Loving, USAF, also flew 151 combat missions in World War II, becoming a P-51 ace. He later served as commander of the Sixth Allied Tactical Air Force and the U.S. Fifth Air Force. His awards include the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, and Air Medal with 24 Oak Leaf Clusters, and he is the author of Woodbine Red Leader. Here, he tells us exactly what it was like to fly the F-80 Shooting Star against MiGs and ground targets in exciting detail.

Hailed as a "pithy and compelling account of an intensely relevant topic" (Kirkus Reviews), this wide-ranging volume offers a superb account of a key moment in modern U.S. and world history. Drawing upon the latest research in archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam, Mark Lawrence creates an extraordinary, panoramic view of all sides of the war. His narrative begins well before American forces set foot in Vietnam, delving into French colonialism's contribution to the 1945 Vietnamese revolution, and revealing how the Cold War concerns of the 1950s led the United States to back the French. The heart of the book covers the "American war," ranging from the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem and the impact of the Tet Offensive to Nixon's expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the final peace agreement of 1973. Finally, Lawrence examines the aftermath of the war, from the momentous liberalization-"Doi Moi"-in Vietnam to the enduring legacy of this infamous war in American books, films, and political debate.

Having learned their trade on the subsonic MiG-17, pilots of the Vietnamese People's Air Force (VPAF) received their first examples of the legendary MiG-21 supersonic fighter in 1966. Soon thrown into combat over North Vietnam, the guided-missile equipped MiG-21 proved a deadly opponent for the US Air Force, US Navy and US Marine Corps crews striking at targets deep in communist territory. Although the communist pilots initially struggled to come to terms with the fighter's air-search radar and weapons systems, the ceaseless cycle of combat operations quickly honed their skills. Indeed, by the time the last US aircraft (a B-52) was claimed by the VPAF on 28 December 1972, no fewer than 13 pilots had become aces flying the MiG-21. Fully illustrated with wartime photographs and detailed colour artwork plates, and including enthralling combat reports, this book examines the many variants of the MiG-21 that fought in the conflict, the schemes they wore and the pilots that flew them.

This volume presents the best scholarly thinking about why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, a pivotal event in modern US foreign policy and international politics. The years since the announcement of the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush in 2003 have revealed that the WMD threat was not the urgent threat the administration declared and that Saddam Hussein was not involved with Al Qaeda or 9/11. At least in part because of these revelations a majority of Americans (not to mention a majority of people globally) now believe that invading Iraq was a mistake and that the Bush administration misled the public to build support for war. Lending credibility to public doubts is a growing number of critical scholarly analyses and in-depth journalistic investigations about the invasion, which mostly suggests that the administration was not fully candid about its reasons for wanting to move against Iraq when it did. Thus the question remains: Why did the United States invade Iraq? The central purpose of this volume is to spur and inform the debate by organizing the best recent thinking of foreign policy and international relations experts about why the U.S. invaded Iraq. Taking a broad range of arguments -- about the role of ideas, Israel, and oil, in partcular - and organizing them around a coherent structure, the book highlights current areas of agreement and disagreement, and allows scholars directly to talk to each other. The volume will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, US foreign and security policy, strategic studies, Middle Eastern politics and IR/Security Studies in general.

In the decades after World War II, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors across Asia and the Pacific found work through the U.S. military. Recently liberated from colonial rule, these workers were drawn to the opportunities the military offered and became active participants of the U.S. empire, most centrally during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Simeon Man uncovers the little-known histories of Filipinos, South Koreans, and Asian Americans who fought in Vietnam, revealing how U.S. empire was sustained through overlapping projects of colonialism and race making. Through their military deployments, Man argues, these soldiers took part in the making of a new Pacific world-a decolonizing Pacific-in which the imperatives of U.S. empire collided with insurgent calls for decolonization, producing often surprising political alliances, imperial tactics of suppression, and new visions of radical democracy.

"International journalism at its best."--Stephen Kinzer

"Every conflict spawns a handful of journalists who are willing to not only brave the war zone but to seek out the stories ignored by the press pack. The Iraq War has brought us Dahr Jamail. . . . I suspect Jamail's account will prove an enduring document of what really happened during the chaotic years of occupation, and how it transformed ordinary Iraqis. . . . It tells everything."--"Mother Jones"

"From the earliest days of the war, Dahr Jamail has been a human conduit for the voices of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. In the face of tremendous personal risk, his commitment to the crucial, principled task of bearing witness has never wavered, and this extraordinary book is the result."--Naomi Klein

Named by AlterNet as one of the top three progressive books of 2007 alongside Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine "and Jeremy Scahill's "Blackwater," Dahr Jamail's "Beyond the Green Zone" goes past the polished desks of the corporate media and Washington politicians to tell first hand of the reality of life in Iraq.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for more than four years. Jamail writes for the Inter Press Service and many other outlets and is a regular guest on "Democracy Now ." He lives in California.

Amy Goodman is a best-selling author and the host of "Democracy Now ."

When Senator Edward Kennedy declared, 'Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam', everyone understood. The Vietnam War has become the touchstone for U.S. military misadventures - a war lost on the home front although never truly lost on the battlefront. During the pivotal decade of 1962 to 1972, U.S. involvement rose from a few hundred advisers to a fighting force of more than one million. This same period saw the greatest schism in American society since the Civil War, a generational divide pitting mothers and fathers against sons and daughters who protested the country's ever-growing military involvement in Vietnam. Meanwhile, well-intentioned decisions in Washington became operational orders with tragic outcomes in the rice paddies, jungles, and villages of Southeast Asia. Through beautifully rendered artwork, "The Vietnam War: A Graphic History" depicts the course of the war from its initial expansion in the early 1960s through the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, and what transpired at home, from the antiwar movement and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the Watergate break-in and the resignation of a president.

The F-105D Thunderchief was originally designed as a low-altitude nuclear strike aircraft, but the outbreak of the Vietnam War led to it being used instead as the USAF's primary conventional striker against the exceptionally well-defended targets in North Vietnam and Laos. F-105 crews conducted long-distance missions from bases in Thailand, refuelling in flight several times and carrying heavy external bombloads.

The MiG-17 was the lightweight, highly manoeuvrable defending fighter it encountered most often in 1965-68 during Operation Rolling Thunder. A development of the MiG-15, which shocked UN forces during the Korean War, its emphasis was on simplicity and ease of maintenance in potentially primitive conditions.

Fully illustrated with stunning artwork, this book shows how these two aircraft, totally different in design and purpose, fought in a series of duels that cost both sides dearly.

A riveting, revealing and news-making account of the CIA's interrogation of Saddam, written by the CIA agent who conducted the questioning. In December 2003, after one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. At the time, John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator. Called upon to make the official ID, Nixon looked for telltale scars and tribal tattoos and asked Hussein a list of questions only he could answer. The man was indeed Saddam Hussein, but as Nixon learned in the ensuing weeks, both he and America had greatly misunderstood just who Saddam Hussein really was. Debriefing the President presents an astounding, candid portrait of one of our era's most notorious strongmen. Nixon, the first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Hussein after his capture, offers expert insight into the history and mind of America's most enigmatic enemy. After years of parsing Hussein's leadership from afar, Nixon faithfully recounts his debriefing sessions and subsequently strips away the mythology surrounding an equally brutal and complex man. His account is not an apology, but a sobering examination of how preconceived ideas led Washington policymakers-and Tony Blair's government -astray. Unflinching and unprecedented, Debriefing the President exposes a fundamental misreading of one of the modern world's most central figures and presents a new narrative that boldly counters the received account.