In the 2010 federal election, independent candidate Andrew Wilkie grabbed headlines after winning the seat of Denison, and with it a key role in deciding who would form the next government of Australia.Before he was a politician, however, Wilkie was Australia's most talked-about whistleblower. In March 2003, Wilkie resigned from Australia's peak intelligence agency in protest over the looming war in Iraq. He was the only serving intelligence officer from the 'coalition of the willing' - the US, the UK and Australia - to do so, and his dramatic move was reported throughout the world. Wilkie's act of conscience put him on a collision course with the Australian government. Why was he willing to risk his career and reputation to tell the truth? What happened when he decided to take a stand? In Axis of Deceit, Wilkie tells his story. He exposes how governments skewed, spun and fabricated intelligence advice. And he offers a rare glimpse into the world of international intelligence and life as a spook. With a brand-new preface, this is the fascinating inside story of a man now set to play a pivotal role in our public life.

No Lack of Courage is the story of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Operation Medusa, the largely Canadian action in Afghanistan from 1 to 17 September 2006, to dislodge a heavily entrenched Taliban force in the Pashmul district of Afghanistans Kandahar Province. At stake, according to senior Afghan politicians and NATO military commanders, was nothing less than the very existence of the reconstituted state of Afghanistan, as well as the NATO alliance itself. In a bitterly fought conflict that lasted more than two weeks, Canadian, Afghan, and Coalition troops defeated the dug-in enemy forces and chased them from the Pashmul area.

In the end, the brunt of the fighting fell on the Canadians, and the operation that saved Afghanistan exacted a great cost. However, the battle also demonstrated that Canada had shed its peacekeeping mythology and was once more ready to commit troops deliberately to combat. Moreover, it revealed yet again that Canadian soldiers have no lack of courage.

A unique on-the-ground account of a country shattered
Iraqi playwright Issam Jameel returned to Iraq after a 12-year exile. Giving up the relative safety of Jordan, he made a perilous journey to Baghdad for a reunion. Unfortunately, the reason for his trip was to grieve for his nephew, recently killed by American forces while guarding an Iraq parliament member from insurgents. Jameel also mourns the loss of a formerly secular civil society replaced by vehement sectarianism, intolerance, and ignorance. Basic human needs like food, water, and power have become an endless daily struggle amidst the shards of infrastructure. Routine tasks, such as selling a house or getting a job are fraught with peril as old scores continue to be settled on religious, ethnic, and political fronts. Everywhere he turns, people are desperate to leave, but fear for the worst. After escaping this madness, he recorded his eyewitness report, desperate to provide an honest and impartial tale of an epic tragedy which has killed more than 100,000 people and displaced many more.
Today, the US government gambles with Iraq's stability by turning a blind eye to Al-Maliki's internal policy, especially after Wikileaks revealed his complicity in death squads. We are jeopardizing the hard-won political gains that the US achieved by neutralizing the Sunnis of Iraq when it converted them from fighters and boycotters to voters. The US administration fails to show much real concern for the future of democracy in Iraq except perhaps for its anxiety about Obama's promises of military withdrawal.
Critics Praise "Iraq Through A Bullet Hole"
"Issam Jameel's "Iraq Through A Bullet Hole" is evocative in the best sense of the word. A native Iraqi, he describes with measured sadness and authenticity the dismemberment of his country by a senseless war. His perspective on events there-both personal and general-will not be found in reporting done by the Western press. His tale reminds us that the things that matter most-family, friends, and faith can and will endure even the most severe trials. I highly recommend this book for its relevance and timelessness."
--Cristobal Krusen, Author and Filmmaker
"Iraq has been a focus for our attention for years now, since our armed forces went looking for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction there. The media have presented a picture-but how real is it? What is life really like in that unfortunate country? Find out by reading this book."
--Robert Rich, PhD, Author of "Cancer: A Personal Challenge"
"Going home is such a trivial thing to so many people in the world. This story is the revealing statement of one man that went home to find it lost in such a strife-filled region, considered by historians as the origin of modern civilization. For those who do know how difficult his journey was, they will relate to Issam's message which is one of perseverance, shared hope and a common faith in mankind that in the end, all could eventually be well. If only men would let it..."
--Bill Evans, civilian contractor in Iraq
More info at www.IraqThruABulletHole.com
Book #5 in the Reflections of History Series from Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com
BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography: General
HIS027170 History: Military - Iraq War (2003-)
HIS026000 History: Middle East - General

LTC Waite provides an honest and raw perspective on the Iraq War from that of a citizen-soldier. He describes for any interested American the effects war has upon the extraordinary people that fight in it, and the families left behind.

Eye-witness accounts of atrocities committed by North Koreans to American prisoners-of-war.

Discusses the experiences of the 65th Infantry, a Puerto Rican infantry unit, during the Korean War. 348 pages. maps. ill.

Fusing perspectives from politics, media studies and cultural studies, and focusing on Iraq, this title offers detailed insights into the impact of different media forms. Fusing perspectives from politics, media studies and cultural studies, "Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication" offers insights into impacts on strategic political communication of the emergence of web-based participatory media ('Web 2.0') across the first decade of the 21st century. Countering the control engendered in strategic political communication, Steve Mann's concepts of hierarchical sousveillance (politically motivated watching of the institutional watchers) and personal sousveillance (apolitical, human-centred life-sharing) is applied to Web 2.0. Focusing on interplays of user-generated and mainstream media about, and from, Iraq, detailed case studies explore different levels of control over strategic political communication during key moments, including the start of the 2003 Iraq war, the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, and Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006. These are contextualized by overviews of political and media environments from 2001-09. Dr Bakir outlines broader implications of sousveillant web-based participatory media for strategic political communication, exploring issues of agenda-building, control, and the cycle of emergence, resistance and reincorporation of Web 2.0. Sousveillance cultures are explored, delineating issues of anonymity, semi-permanence, instanteneity resistance and social change.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL How quickly we forget our heroes... those who daily risk their lives for our freedom. It is difficult to imagine the anguish, the determination and yes even the fear, in the heart of a man driven by enemy fire into a fox hole. How do you capture in words the feelings and thoughts of soldiers under attack by the enemy? William A. Cummins met that challenge with this remarkable book, "THE FORGOTTEN" as he unveils a series of stories by Korean War Veterans depicting their combat experiences in their very own words. Battlefield experiences from a war that must never be forgotten. You will follow a 19 year old PFC Marine from his sharecropping youth in Ohio to a brutal battlefield ambush in Korea and finally to a pulpit in Florida. Dozens of stories and photographs of our unsung heroes provide a written witness to the nearly three million people who perished during that horrific war. Each veteran expresses a small fragment of himself during the war for his children and grandchildren to read in a book.

Soon after the bombs stopped falling on Kabul, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city. This is her trenchant report from the city where she spent the next four winters working in humanitarian aid. Investigating the city's prison for women, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, Jones enters the lives of everyday women and men and reveals through small events some big disjunctions: between the new Afghan "democracy" and the still-entrenched warlords, between American promises and performance, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, "Kabul in Winter" brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends upon our own.

The Hills Went Boom
Join with the "United States Marine Corps " newly formed Reconnaissance Battalion. The year is 1952 and twelve enlisted men; eleven Marines and one US Navy Corpsman have completed their yearlong Reconnaissance, Demolition and Survival training.
The twelve are known as "Recon Unit One" and their mission is to conduct clandestine and highly classified raids on tunnels and caves in the Chinese Communist controlled mountains of North Korea.
The missions are complex and filled with danger from many sources. Operating well North of the UN mandated DMZ, in enemy territory; these twelve have been sent to destroy the caves and tunnels of North Korea, most of them built during the Japanese occupation.
The Unit must parachute into zones occupied by enemy forces, secure the area, reconnoiter the caves and tunnels then destroy them and "get out" using methods here-to-for unused for these purposes. The reader will identify with some or all of the men who make up this elite force. They come from all walks of life, in post World War II America, and have the same frailties and strengths most of us share.
As with all things military there are moments of humor, as well as those moments of danger. Those moments that rekindles our memory and touches our hearts, minds and souls.
-Hank Acker

"A powerful, haunting, provocative memoir of a Marine in Iraq--and his struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in a system trying to hide the damage done

"Marine Sergeant Clint Van Winkle flew to war on Valentine's Day 2003. His battalion was among the first wave of troops that crossed into Iraq, and his first combat experience was the battle of Nasiriyah, followed by patrols throughout the country, house to house searches, and operations in the dangerous Baghdad slums.

But after two tours of duty, certain images would not leave his memory--a fragmented mental movie of shooting a little girl; of scavenging parts from a destroyed, blood-spattered tank; of obliterating several Iraqi men hidden behind an ancient wall; and of mistakenly stepping on a "soft spot," the remains of a Marine killed in combat. After his return home, Van Winkle sought help at a Veterans Administration facility, and so began a maddening journey through an indifferent system that promises to care for veterans, but in fact abandons many of them.

From riveting scenes of combat violence, to the gallows humor of soldiers fighting a war that seems to make no sense, to moments of tenderness in a civilian life ravaged by flashbacks, rage, and doubt, "Soft Spots "reveals the mind of a soldier like no other recent memoir of the war that has consumed America.

After a series of disastrous missteps in its conduct of the war, the White House in 2006 appointed General David Petraeus as the Commanding General of the coalition forces. "Tell Me How This Ends" is an inside account of his attempt to turn around a failing war.

Linda Robinson conducted extensive interviews with Petraeus and his subordinate commanders and spent weeks with key U.S. and Iraqi divisions. The result is the only book that ties together military operations in Iraq and the internecine political drama that is at the heart of the civil war.

Replete with dramatic battles, behind-doors confrontations, and astute analysis, the book tells the full story of the Iraq War's endgame, and lays out the options that will be facing the next president when he or she takes office in January 2009.

They marched under the heat with 40-pound rucksacks on their backs. They fired M16s out of the windows of military vehicles, defending their units in deadly firefights. And they did things that their male counterparts could never do--gather intelligence on the Taliban from the women of Afghanistan. As females they could circumvent Muslim traditions and cultivate relationships with Afghan women who were bound by tradition not to speak with American military men. And their work in local villages helped empower Afghan women, providing them with the education and financial tools necessary to rebuild their nation--and the courage to push back against the insurgency that wanted to destroy it. For the women warriors of the military's Female Engagement Teams (FET) it was dangerous, courageous, and sometimes heartbreaking work. Beyond the Call follows the groundbreaking journeys of three women as they first fight military brass and culture and then enemy fire and tradition. And like the men with whom they served, their battles were not over when they returned home.

A soldier's tale of Iraq.
This autobiographical tale covers one woman's journey through the first wave of Operation Enduring Freedom. Deployed from February 2003 through May 2004 with the 248TH Engineer Company (Combat) (Heavy) out of Norwich, Connecticut, First Lieutenant Works recants some of the most powerful memories of her deployment and military service. Heartfelt and brutally honest, the vignettes and images this author conjures offer the reader a unique look into the combat experiences of our modern troops.

By April Fools Day 2004, the war to liberate Iraq had "officially" ended with Saddam Hussein's capture and President Bush's announcement that major combat operations had ceased. The truth was the war in Iraq was just getting warmed up, and it was at this point that the 1st Battalion, 161st Infantry of the Washington Army National Guard arrived in Baghdad. This is the story of Charlie Company's 1st Platoon, who were mobilized for federal service and attached to the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team for a year in Iraq. A motley crew of part-time weekend warriors, 1st Platoon had its share of cops and criminals, professors and students, fathers and husbands, teenage privates eager to see war and thirtysomething veterans who had served in Panama and Kuwait. This is the story of 1st Platoon as told from the perspective of their "Invisible Embed" Rob Kauder, a former Marine turned journalist serving as a National Guard infantry squad leader. In The Highlanders Kauder captures the stories of struggle and sacrifice of the enlisted men as they fought the boredom, madness, heartbreak and the enemies both inside and outside the wire of the Green Zone.

Though a part of American soldiers' lives since the Revolutionary War, by World War II music could be broadcast to the front. Today it accompanies soldiers from the recruiting office to the battlefield. For this book, Jonathan Pieslak interviewed returning veterans to learn about the place of music in the Iraq War and in contemporary American military culture in general. Pieslak describes how American soldiers hear, share, use, and produce music both on and off duty. He studies the role of music from recruitment campaigns and basic training to its use "in country" before and during missions. Pieslak explores themes of power, chaos, violence, and survival in the metal and hip-hop music so popular among the troops, and offers insight into the daily lives of American soldiers in the Middle East.

United States Army Center of Military History publication, CMH Pub 70-113-1. United States Army in Iraq and Afghanistan Series. Edited by Jon T. Hoffman. Provides a soldier's-eye view of the Iraq war.

How People's Republic of China interacts with the United States will partly determine the world's order in the 21st century. The Korean War-the only time that China confronted the U.S.-remains a rich source for lessons on the Sino-U.S. relationship. War was the last thing China needed in 1950, and Mao Zedong never really got along with Joseph Stalin, so why did Mao decide to lean toward the USSR and to challenge the United States? What was the context and rationale for Mao's decisions? These questions were analyzed and answered in the context of "Mao's American strategy." The strategy was established after direct contact with U.S. officials and analyses of U.S. policy during and after World War II. Mao was convinced in the 1940's that the U.S., for its own national interests, would interfere with China's internal affairs sooner or later, and that a military confrontation was so likely that it was only a matter of when and where. Mao's American strategy was important then, and still is for China to consider its contemporary foreign policies. Without understanding this strategy, it is difficult to forecast what the China-U.S. relationship might be in the 21st century. The book is written for historians, diplomats, military strategists, and anyone who is interested in an understanding of the historic perspective that China brings to its foreign policy.

"Standard Operating Procedure" is the story of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse, as seen through the eyes and told through the voices of the soldiers who took them and appeared in them. It is the story of how those soldiers were at once the instruments and victims of a great injustice.

Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris' startlingly frank and intimate interviews with the soldier-photographers who gave us what have become iconic images of the Iraq War.

'A compelling meditation on a descent into cruelty. ' " Daily Telegraph"

'An extraordinary book . . . Although Gourevitch lets the soldiers speak for themselves, his few analytical forays are invaluable.' " Guardian"

Hard Lessons reviews the Iraq reconstruction experience from mid-2002 through the fall of 2008. Like SIGIR's previous lessons learned reports, this study is not an audit. Rather, it arises from our congressional mandate to provide "advice and recommendations on policies to promote economy, efficiency, and effectiveness" in programs created for Iraq's relief and reconstruction. The report presents a chronological history of the reconstruction program, threading together a number of themes including: the enormous challenges that security problems posed for rebuilding efforts the dramatic and frequently reactive course-changes in reconstruction strategy the turbulence engendered by continual personnel turnover at every level the waste caused by inadequate contracting and program management practices the poor integration of interagency efforts caused by weak unity of command and inconsistent unity of effort. The text of this report-through vignette, interview, and factual detail-explicates these themes by, in turn, laying out the blinkered and disjointed prewar planning for postwar Iraq; the CPA's large and ultimately too ambitious expansion of the reconstruction program; the security-driven reprogrammings required by the exploding insurgency; the strongly resourced response of the surge; and the rise of Iraq's role in its own reconstruction. Hard Lessons answers some important questions about the U.S. relief and reconstruction program in Iraq: Did the program meet the goals it set for itself? Was the program grossly burdened by waste and fraud? Why did reconstruction efforts so often fail to meet their mark? The research for Hard Lessons comprised interviews with hundreds of individuals and the review of thousands of documents. SIGIR reached out to virtually every major player in the Iraq reconstruction experience and almost all agreed to be interviewed or provide useful responses. Among others, Secretaries Powell, Rumsfeld, Gates, and Rice; USAID Administrator Natsios and Deputy Administrator Kunder; Deputy Secretaries Wolfowitz, England, Armitage and Negroponte; Under Secretary Feith; Ambassadors Bremer, Khalilzad, Crocker, Jeffrey, Satterfield, Speckhard, Taylor, and Saloom; and Generals Garner, Abizaid, McKiernan, Strock, Eaton, Sanchez, Casey, Petraeus, Odierno, Chiarelli, Dempsey, and McCoy were all interviewed by SIGIR or gave helpful information or advice. We also interviewed Iraqi leaders, including former Prime Ministers Allawi and Ja'afari, Deputy Prime Ministers Chalabi and Salih, Ambassador Sumaida'ie, Judge Radhi, and Minister Baban. Equally important to the study, SIGIR staff interviewed hundreds of military members, government officials, and civilian contractors who carried out the "brick and mortar" work of Iraq's relief and reconstruction. The report also draws on the body of SIGIR audits, inspections, and investigations, as well as reports from other investigative bodies.

When President George W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, he did so without the explicit approval of the Security Council. His father's administration, by contrast, carefully funneled statecraft through the United Nations and achieved Council authorization for the U.S.-led Gulf War in 1991. The history of American policy toward Iraq displays considerable variation in the extent to which policies were conducted through the UN and other international organizations.

In Channels of Power, Alexander Thompson surveys U.S. policy toward Iraq, starting with the Gulf War, continuing through the interwar years of sanctions and coercive disarmament, and concluding with the 2003 invasion and its long aftermath. He offers a framework for understanding why powerful states often work through international organizations when conducting coercive policies-and why they sometimes choose instead to work alone or with ad hoc coalitions. The conventional wisdom holds that because having legitimacy for their actions is important for normative reasons, states seek multilateral approval.

Channels of Power offers a rationalist alternative to these standard legitimation arguments, one based on the notion of strategic information transmission: When state actions are endorsed by an independent organization, this sends politically crucial information to the world community, both leaders and their publics, and results in greater international support.