THE END OF IRAQ: How American Incompetence Created a War without End

THE END OF IRAQ: How American Incompetence Created a War without End, Peter W. Galbraith, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2006,260 pages, $26.00.

Of all the books written on the war in Iraq this year, The End of Iraq is one of the few to actually chart a way ahead for what is arguably the world's most prominent failing state. A former ambassador with nationbuilding experience, Peter Galbraith concludes his landmark study of a nation on the edge of collapse with a definitive solution: separate Iraq into ethnically centric, semi-autonomous regions governed by a central, broad-based confederation.

According to Galbraith, our efforts to hold the Iraqi state together by force are themselves destabilizing. Our policies in Iraq fail to acknowledge a national history rife with massive armies, repressive governments, internal genocide, and unrequited aggression throughout the region. America's efforts to unify a fundamentally fractured society have merely served to spawn...