POLICY LESSONS FROM AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE

Abstract

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. (2008), The Three Trillion Dollar War. The True
Cost of the Iraq Conflict. London: Penguin. 311 pages. In April 2008, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the US was “pretty much clueless
on counterinsurgency” during the first year of the Iraq War. This confession says
much about the ongoing war in that country. At that time, it will be remembered,
Wolfowitz was the US Deputy Secretary for Defence and together with his boss, the
then Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was a leading “Neo-Con” (Neo-
Conservative) – as this ever more notorious thread of American foreign policy
thinking has been called.
Six years on – and well over a million Americans and Iraqis dead – the truth is,
at last, seeping through about the invasion of Iraq, its immediate aftermath and the
drawn-out war.