THE IRAQ WAR READER

A new book by Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf

Three weeks into the war, Saddam Hussein’s control over Iraq has crumbled. The question now is: Was that the easy part? America now has responsibility to keep order in Iraq, put a new government in place, and get the economy and oil fields running again. Long-repressed people, including the country’s Shiite majority and Kurdish nationalists, are seeking their fair share of power. Neighboring countries all have their reasons to meddle in what might come next. U.S. officials are already hinting that Syria and/or Iran could be next. It looks to be a long time before all American troops come home.

Are Americans ready for Iraq to be, de facto, our 51st state? Do they understand the stakes involved in reshaping the Middle East? Will the U.S. make room for the international community in Iraq, both to help investigate Saddam’s secrets and to help rebuild the country? The debate over the Iraq War is far from over. For those wondering about the policies that led to the conflict, and the daunting challenges that will confront America and the Middle East once the immediate crisis has ended, Touchstone Books is proud to present THE IRAQ WAR READER (a Touchstone Paperback Original / Simon & Schuster; May 6, 2003; $16.00; 0-7432-5347-7), edited by Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf. The coeditors of the acclaimed Gulf War Reader have assembled essays and documents that present an eminently readable, up-to-the-minute guide from every imaginable perspective, spanning the roots of the conflict in World War I to the future of post-Saddam Iraq and Washington’s Pax Americana. (Contributors include: Fouad Ajami, George Bush, Richard Butler (original essay), Robert Byrd, John Le Carre, Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Friedman, Al Gore, Seymour Hersh, Christopher Hitchens, Arianna Huffington, Saddam Hussein, Terry Jones, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Nicholas Lemann, Kanan Makiya, Kevin Phillips (original essay), Kenneth Pollack, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, William Safire, Jonathan Schell, Susan Sontag, and George Will.)

Extraordinary in scope, THE IRAQ WAR READER explores how oil economics, power politics, dreams of empire, nationalist yearnings, and religious fanaticism have conspired to create the fateful collision of the West and the Arab world over Iraq. The book also takes a hard look at the new Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive action and ponders whether this will prevent more 9/11s or turn into, as some view it, a destabilizing and self-defeating grab at imperial dominance. Could this be the beginning of a much larger political and military campaign by the U.S. to reshape the entire region? Certainly, the temptation to do so having seen how effective and overpowering the U.S. military can be is there. If nothing else, the Iraq war marks the end of American provincialism, and the assumption that we could safely pay little attention to events across the oceans from us. America is now inextricably a part of the Middle East.

About the Author: Christopher Cerf is an author, record and television producer, composer-lyricist, editor, and co-founder and president of the educational television production company Sirius Thinking, Ltd. Since its first season in 1970, Cerf has played a pivotal role in the creation and production of the Sesame Street television program, most notably as a regular contributor of music and lyrics. He was a key participant in National Lampoon, Not the New York Times, The Pentagon Catalog: Ordinary Products at Extraordinary Prices, and The Official Politically Correct Dictionary, written with National Lampoon collaborator Henry Beard, which first appeared in 1992 and is now in its 16th U.S. printing.

The Iraq War Reader is Cerf’s third political anthology, his second in collaboration with Micah L. Sifry. Small Fires, a collection of letters written by Soviet citizens at the dawn of glasnost, was hailed by Studs Terkel as having captured "a dramatic historic moment as hardly any other work has done." And Washington Post Book World called Cerf and Sifry’s Gulf War Reader, the predecessor to this book, "a remarkably interesting collection… a highly valuable book."