The Iraq war has unleashed such a torrent of opinion…impassioned polemic, neo-con apologia, world-weary cynicism…that it feels like the important truths are being lost in a media feeding-frenzy. Eliot Weinberger eschews the rhetoric of the soapbox in an extraordinary montage of facts, sound-bites and testimonies. He assembles an uncompromising and blackly comic narrative, which permits the voices of the war to speak for themselves, and allows the protagonists to damn themselves in their own words.

This pocket-sized volume is vast in scope, a work unlike any other you have read on Iraq, which finds an unexpected eloquence in its refusal to join in the facile band-standing and selective amnesia of so much contemporary commentary.

From What I Heard About Iraq

On September 11, 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to “hit” Iraq. I heard that he said: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

I heard that Condoleezza Rice asked: “How do you capitalize on these opportunities?”

I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95% of the Iraqi casualties were “military-age males.”

I heard the Red Cross say that casualties were so high that the hospitals had stopped counting.

I heard that this was the first American president in wartime who had never attended a funeral for a dead soldier. I heard that photographs of the flag-draped coffins returning home were banned. I heard that the Pentagon had renamed body bags “transfer tubes.”

Eliot Weinberger is a poet, an editor and translator, and the author of several books including Karmic Traces and 9/12: New York.

96 pages

Paper
1 84467 036 8
£7.99
N/A in the US and Canada

A Verso/LRB Book