Ryan's Reviews > The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War

One of the best books written about the Iraq war -- starting in 2001/2002 with the initial hesitating deployment of CIA personnel to work with KDP and PUK in the no-fly zone, and continuing to the beginning of the ground war in 2003. Written by Sam Faddis, who was the head of this operation for CIA,

This book answers a few big questions: why was the initial invasion of Iraq so understaffed, especially in the North (answer: DOD kept wishing Turkey would act against its own long-term interests and repeatedly revealed preferences and support the Kurds, and somehow policymakers never accepted reality and prepared an alternative plan); what was the deal with WMD (CIA on the ground was providing accurate and inconclusive information about WMD, and never found any solid evidence; the internal USG reasons for invading Iraq were not about immediate WMD threat, but WMD threat was used to sell the invasion to the public for political reasons, which had the disadvantage of being a lie); why didn't the Kurds get to do more in the initial war anyway (DOD-CIA rivalry and a political desire to not have the Kurds appear to be invading Arab cities, even when the alternatives were worse); why was the post-invasion so bad (people like Paul Bremer at CPA, genuine incompetence and bureaucracy in Washington, and unwillingness to face reality.)

As you'd expect by a CIA officer, it's well structured, and provides a lot of interesting details of daily life in Kurdistan before the war started. The most comparable book to this is First In by Gary Schroen, who did basically the same thing in Afghanistan with much more success (due to a more supportive US Government and less meddling).