Donald Trump betrayed the Kurds, America's most reliable allies in the fight against ISIS, by announcing in a tweet that US troops would withdraw from Syria. Betrayal is nothing new in Kurdish history, especially by Western powers. The Kurds, a nation with its own history, language, and culture, were not included in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which contained no provision for a Kurdish state. As a result, the land of Kurds was divided into the territories of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In this updated and expanded edition of the 2016 The Kurds: A Modern History, Michael Gunter adds over 50 new pages that recount and analyze recent political, military, and economic events from 2016 to the end of 2018. Gunter's book also features fascinating vignettes about his experiences in the region during the past 30 years. He integrates personal accounts, such as a 1998 interview with the now-imprisoned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader, Abdullah Ocalan, his participation [or attendance if that's more accurate] at the Kurdistan Democratic Party Congress in 1993, and a meeting with the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2012. In 2017, the University of Hewler in Irbil invited him to give the keynote address before a gathering of 700 guests from academia and politics, including the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Nechirvan Barzani. In his speech, Gunter praised the KRG's positive achievements and highlighted continuing problems, such as KRG disunity, corruption, nepotism, and financial difficulties. Within hours, reactions to his address went viral throughout the land. Several TV channels and other news outlets reported that officials had tried to interrupt him. A few months later, this event would prove a harbinger of the Kurdish disaster that followed the ill-timed KRG referendum on independence. As an indirect consequence of the referendum, the KRG lost one-third of its territory. The book concludes with a new chapter, Back to Square One, which analyzes the KRG election in October 2018 and the latest twists and turns in the Syrian crisis.

What is Leadership? Dr. Richard Berry presents a thought-provoking depiction of current leadership theories as myths because of the effort to exclude or conceal the meaning and value of emotion. This would suggest that current leadership theory is incomplete due not only to the absence of emotions but independent thought and intuition as well. Lieutenant Colonel Allen West-a husband, father of two, and a military officer with an impeccable service record including a previous award for valor-had his military career ended prematurely when he undertook extraordinary measures to protect the lives of his men. He was serving in Tikrit, Iraq, the home of the late Sadaam Hussein and dead center of what we all know today as the Sunni Triangle. He was not wounded, killed in action, or taken prisoner, but instead charged with felony offenses by the United States Army for mistreating an Iraqi detainee, who was believed to have information that was going to kill American soldiers. This book documents what the effects of leadership can be when the power of the human spirit is allowed to flourish at the individual, group and organizational levels.

In the decades since the "forgotten war" in Korea, conventional wisdom has held that the Eighth Army consisted largely of poorly trained, undisciplined troops who fled in terror from the onslaught of the Communist forces. Now, military historian Thomas E. Hanson argues that the generalizations historians and fellow soldiers have used regarding these troops do little justice to the tens of thousands of soldiers who worked to make themselves and their army ready for war.
In Hanson's careful study of combat preparedness in the Eighth Army from 1949 to the outbreak of hostilities in 1950, he concedes that the U.S. soldiers sent to Korea suffered gaps in their professional preparation, from missing and broken equipment to unevenly trained leaders at every level of command. But after a year of progressive, focused, and developmental collective training--based largely on the lessons of combat in World War II--these soldiers expected to defeat the Communist enemy.
By recognizing the constraints under which the Eighth Army operated, Hanson asserts that scholars and soldiers will be able to discard what Douglas Macarthur called the "pernicious myth" of the Eighth Army's professional, physical, and moral ineffectiveness.

Donald Trump betrayed the Kurds, America's most reliable allies in the fight against ISIS, by announcing in a tweet that US troops would withdraw from Syria. Betrayal is nothing new in Kurdish history, especially by Western powers. The Kurds, a nation with its own history, language, and culture, were not included in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which contained no provision for a Kurdish state. As a result, the land of Kurds was divided into the territories of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In this updated and expanded edition of the 2016 The Kurds: A Modern History, Michael Gunter adds over 50 new pages that recount and analyze recent political, military, and economic events from 2016 to the end of 2018. Gunter's book also features fascinating vignettes about his experiences in the region during the past 30 years. He integrates personal accounts, such as a 1998 interview with the now-imprisoned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader, Abdullah Ocalan, his participation [or attendance if that's more accurate] at the Kurdistan Democratic Party Congress in 1993, and a meeting with the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2012. In 2017, the University of Hewler in Irbil invited him to give the keynote address before a gathering of 700 guests from academia and politics, including the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Nechirvan Barzani. In his speech, Gunter praised the KRG's positive achievements and highlighted continuing problems, such as KRG disunity, corruption, nepotism, and financial difficulties. Within hours, reactions to his address went viral throughout the land. Several TV channels and other news outlets reported that officials had tried to interrupt him. A few months later, this event would prove a harbinger of the Kurdish disaster that followed the ill-timed KRG referendum on independence. As an indirect consequence of the referendum, the KRG lost one-third of its territory. The book concludes with a new chapter, Back to Square One, which analyzes the KRG election in October 2018 and the latest twists and turns in the Syrian crisis.

A history of Japan, this work draws on a range of Japanese sources to offer an analysis of how shattering defeat in World War II, followed by over six years of military occupation by the USA, affected every level of Japanese society - in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. Here is the history of an extraordinary moment in the history of Japanese culture, when new values warred with old, and when early ideals of "peace and democracy" were soon challenged by the "reverse course" decision to incorporate Japan into the Cold War Pax Americana. The work chronicles not only the material and psychological impact of utter defeat but also the early emergence of dynamic countercultures that gave primacy to the private as opposed to public spheres - in short, a liberation from totalitarian wartime control. John Dower shows how the tangled legacies of this intense, turbulent and unprecedented interplay of conqueror and conquered, West and East, wrought the utterly foreign and strangely familiar Japan of today.

The United States and its allies have been fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan for a decade in a war that either side could still win. While a gradual drawdown has begun, significant numbers of US combat troops will remain in Afghanistan until at least 2014, perhaps longer, depending on the situation on the ground and the outcome of the US presidential election in 2012. Given the realities of the Taliban's persistence and the desire of US policymakers - and the public - to find a way out, what can and should be the goals of the US and its allies in Afghanistan? "Afghan Endgames" brings together some of the finest minds in the fields of history, strategy, anthropology, ethics, and mass communications to provide a clear, balanced, and comprehensive assessment of the alternatives for restoring peace and stability to Afghanistan. Presenting a range of options - from immediate withdrawal of all coalition forces to the maintenance of an open-ended, but greatly reduced military presence - the contributors weigh the many costs, risks, and benefits of each alternative. This important book boldly pursues several strands of thought suggesting that a strong, legitimate central government is far from likely to emerge in Kabul; that fewer coalition forces, used in creative ways, may have better effects on the ground than a larger, more conventional presence; and that, even though Pakistan should not be pushed too hard, so as to avoid sparking social chaos there, Afghanistan's other neighbors can and should be encouraged to become more actively involved. The volume's editors conclude that while there may never be complete peace in Afghanistan, a self-sustaining security system able to restore order swiftly in the wake of violence is attainable.

A riveting, action-filled account that sheds light on the realities of working in a war-torn country, this is the first book on the war in Iraq by a South African.

Johan Raath and a security team were escorting American engineers to a power plant south of Baghdad when they were ambushed. He had first arrived in Iraq only two weeks before. This was a small taste of what was to come over the next 13 years while he worked there as a private military contractor (PMC). His mission? Not to wage war but to protect lives. Raath acted as a bodyguard for VIPs and, more often, engineers who were involved in construction projects to rebuild the country after the 2003 war. His physical and mental endurance was tested to the limit in his efforts to safeguard construction sites that were regularly subjected to mortar and suicide attacks. Key to his survival was his training as a Special Forces operator, or Recce.

Working in places called the Triangle of Death and driving on the ‘Hell Run’, Raath had numerous hair-raising experiences. As a trained combat medic he also helped to save people’s lives after two suicide bomb attacks on sites he then worked at.

With the vague intention of winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan, the US government has mismanaged billions of development and logistics dollars, bolstered the drug trade, and dumped untold millions into Taliban hands. That is the sobering message of this scathing critique of our war effort in Afghanistan. According to this book, America has already lost the war. While conducting extensive research and fieldwork in Afghanistan's war zones, a drumbeat of off-the-record and offhand remarks pointed the author to one conclusion: "We blew it." The sentiment was even blazoned across a US military fortification, as the author saw at Forward Operating Base Mehtar Lam in insurgency-wracked Laghman Province: "I glanced over at a concrete blast barrier while waiting for a helicopter," Wissing says. "Someone had spray-painted in jagged letters: 'The GAME. You Lost It.'" The author's vivid narrative takes the reader down to ground level in frontline Afghanistan. It draws on the voices of hundreds of combat soldiers, ordinary Afghans, private contractors, aid workers, international consultants, and government officials. From these contacts it became glaringly clear, as the author details, that American taxpayer dollars have been flowing into Taliban coffers, courtesy of scandalously mismanaged US development and counterinsurgency programs, with calamitous military and social consequences. This is the first book to detail the toxic embrace of American policymakers and careerists, Afghan kleptocrats, and the opportunistic Taliban. The result? US taxpayers have been footing the bill for both sides of a disastrous Afghanistan war.

War has changed over the past centuries. The war on terror and the hopes to change nations to democratic policies is an uphill and dangerous battle.

The Bush administration was remarkably successful in dominating the debate over why we had to go to war with Iraq, but it would soon be faced with the more daunting task of winning the monumental rhetorical struggle over how to write the script of the Iraq War endgame. We examine the twists and turns of the discursive battle over the war's denouement as it played out against the backdrop of the war on terror, and we conclude that while Bush failed to win the argument that Iraq was one with our fight against terrorism, his underlying worldview that we must confront terrorist evil through global military engagement remains an important component of Obama adminstration rhetoric.

Since World War II "victim consciousness" (higaisha ishiki) has been an essential component of Japanese pacifist national identity. In his meticulously crafted narrative and analysis, James Orr reveals how postwar Japanese elites and American occupying authorities collaborated to structure the parameters of remembrance of the war, including the notion that the emperor and his people had been betrayed and duped by militarists. Fluently written and flawlessly executed, The Victim as Hero will contribute greatly to the discourses on nationalism and war responsibility in Japan.

'Gripping ... A terrific action narrative' Max Hastings 'Reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, yet every word is true ... This is modern warfare close-up and raw' Andrew Roberts Bestselling and Orwell Prize-winning author Toby Harnden tells the gripping and incredible story of the six-day battle that began the War in Afghanistan and how it set the scene for twenty years of conflict. The West is in shock. Al-Qaeda has struck the US on 9/11 and thousands are dead. Within weeks, UK Special Forces enter the fray in Afghanistan alongside the CIA's Team Alpha and US troops. Victory is swift, but fragile. Hundreds of jihadists surrender and two operatives from Team Alpha enter Qala-i Jangi - the 'Fort of War' - to interrogate them. The prisoners revolt, one CIA man falls, and the other is trapped inside the fort. Seven members of the SBS - elite British Special Forces - volunteer for the rescue force and race into danger and the unknown. The six-day battle that follows proves to be one of the bloodiest of the Afghanistan war as the SBS and their American comrades face an enemy determined to die in the mud citadel. Superbly researched, First Casualty is based on unprecedented access to the CIA, SBS, and US Special Forces. Orwell Prize-winning author Toby Harnden recounts the gripping story of that first battle in Afghanistan and how the haunting foretelling it contained - unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks, and errant bombs - was ignored, fueling the twenty-year conflict to come.

• Now available in paperback
• Winner of the 2007 American Authors Association Golden Quill Award
• Winner of the 2007 Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award

In Iraq, the front lines are everywhere - and everywhere in Iraq, no matter what their job descriptions say, women in the U.S. military are fighting--more than 155,000 of them. A critical and commercial success in hardcover, "Band of Sisters" presents a dozen groundbreaking and often heart-wrenching stories of American women in combat in Iraq, such as the U.S.'s first female pilot to be shot down and survive, the military's first black female pilot in combat, a young turret gunner defending convoys, and a nurse struggling to save lives, including her own.

Learn more now at Author Kirsten Holmstedt's website.