The U.S. invasion of Iraq has been criticized from many perspectives. In Selling War, Steven J. Alvarez advances the idea that it was a public relations failure—not from the Bush administration’s eventual loss of American confidence but for the abject failure to reach Iraqis. A retired decorated U.S. Army major, Alvarez served as a public affairs officer in Bagdad’s fortified Green Zone and observed first hand the lack of strategic imagination coupled with the sheer stupidity of some staffers charged with running occupied Iraq. “With information an informed Iraqi people could have slowed, if not stopped, the societal and cultural violence in their world,” he argues. But given the ineptitude of the Bush administration, one has to wonder whether the occupation authorities had much positive information to offer.
