SANDS OF WAR

About this book

<p><b>SANDS OF WAR — Audiobook · Narrated by Gabriel Castillo.</b></p> <p>🎧 Listen time: 4 hours 44 minutes</p> <b>Iraq War history — Desert Storm, the Gulf War, and the road to the 2003 Iraq invasion. Narrative American military history of the Middle East, 1990-2003. Colin Powell, George H.W. Bush, and the decisions that shaped America's longest wars.</b> <p>At two in the morning on August 2, 1990, approximately a hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers crossed into Kuwait with more than two thousand tanks. By mid-morning, the Kuwaiti royal family had fled and Iraqi forces controlled the oil fields holding ten percent of the world's proven petroleum reserves. Saddam Hussein had miscalculated one thing: George H.W. Bush's response. What followed was the last clean American military triumph — a hundred-hour ground war, a left-hook flanking maneuver through the Saudi desert, and a coalition of thirty-four nations built through James Baker's extraordinary diplomacy. And then, thirteen years later, a different Bush launched a different war on the same battlefield — one built on intelligence that was wrong and arguments made in bad faith, producing consequences still unfolding today.</p> <p>In this narrative military history of America in the Middle East, historian Gerald Thomas Whitaker traces both bookends: <b>George H.W. Bush's Gulf War coalition, the hundred-hour Desert Storm campaign, the decision not to march to Baghdad, the decade of sanctions and no-fly zones, Colin Powell's UN presentation, and the 2003 Iraq invasion</b> that followed. The contrast illuminates the distance American foreign policy traveled in thirteen years — from the careful multilateralism of the Cold War's end to the unilateral overconfidence of the post-9/11 moment.</p> <h4>Inside this Iraq War and Gulf War history:</h4> <ul> <li><b>The Glaspie meeting</b> — Ambassador April Glaspie's July 25, 1990 conversation with Saddam and the fatal ambiguity that may have greenlighted the Kuwait invasion (Chapter 1)</li> <li><b>Baker's coalition</b> — how Secretary of State Baker secured Soviet support, a 52-47 Senate vote, and thirty-four contributing nations for a war that was genuinely multilateral (Chapter 2)</li> <li><b>The hundred-hour war</b> — Schwarzkopf's left-hook flanking maneuver, 147 American dead, and why the Republican Guard escaped (Chapter 4)</li> <li><b>The decision not to go to Baghdad</b> — Bush and Scowcroft's reasoning, the Shia uprising Saddam suppressed while American troops watched, and the 300,000 Iraqi dead in the marshes (Chapters 5-6)</li> <li><b>The decade of containment</b> — UNSCOM weapons inspections, the Oil-for-Food corruption, Operation Desert Fox, and al-Qaeda's rise (Chapters 9-12)</li> <li><b>Powell's UN presentation</b> — the intelligence failure, the arguments made in bad faith, and how Colin Powell later called it a blot on his record (Chapter 13)</li> <li><b>Bremer's de-Baathification order</b> — how dismantling the Iraqi army created the Sunni insurgency, the Fallujah battles, and Abu Ghraib (Chapters 17-19)</li> </ul> <p>This Iraq War history asks why the quality of decision-making matters — why Bush 41's careful statecraft produced a limited triumph while Bush 43's motivated reasoning produced a strategic catastrophe. The soldiers did not fail in Iraq; the decisions that sent them there and failed to plan for what followed did.</p> <p><b>For listeners of the audiobook of Bob Woodward's PLAN OF ATTACK and Thomas Ricks's FIASCO.</b></p>