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Iraq And Back: Inside the War to Win the Peace | 
 enlarge | Author: Kim Olson
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 782997
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 211
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 1591145279
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.70443092
EAN: 9781591145271
ASIN: 1591145279
Publication Date: September 1, 2006
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Product Description
In April 2003, soon after Operation Iraqi Freedom had been declared a success, President Bush sent retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to Iraq to rebuild the country. As Garner s executive officer, the author of this book was part of the senior leadership circle charged with three tasks. They were to reconstruct Iraq s infrastructure, provide humanitarian assistance, and lay the foundation for a democratic process to take hold. But not long after their arrival in the rubble and ruin of Iraq, the political, military, and economic wheels ground to a halt and theirs became mission improbable. In this book, Air Force colonel Kim Olson tells how and why. Readers are privy to the candid discussions of U.S. generals frustrated by operating in a policy void. They sit at the table with Iraqi leaders who warn of an impending insurgency if the proclamations crafted by ill-informed and arrogant policy makers are implemented. And they share Olson s fear as Saddam s death squads attempt to assassinate her in an explosion of bullets. This gripping, firsthand account of what went wrong is seen from Olson s unique point of view as a senior female military officer, pilot, wife, and mother. Many of the stories she tells are known to only the handful of people involved, including a mission to rescue two Iraqi women and details of early meetings with tribal leaders to discuss building a coalition government--an effort quashed by Garner s successor. Her haunting descriptions of Shiite families searching for loved ones in Saddam s killing fields and malnourished children in the town of Umn Qasr untouched by the International Oil-for-Food Program, will remain with readers long after they close the book. From the decisions of political leaders and military commanders to everyday encounters with the Iraqi people and informal conversations with soldiers, such a wealth of honest, insider information is rare. No other author weaves together military, political, and humanistic insights so effectively.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
Trailblazer in a vale of tears October 4, 2006
Charles A. Krohn (Burke, VA USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Colonel Olson rose to the top rank of Air Force jet pilots by taking charge of her professional life. Like other hard-chargers, she won some, lost some. This book lays out the atmospherics of Baghdad during the first hectic and terrible days of the American occupation, working along side Jay Garner. Flashbacks explain how she was invited to be Garner's executive officer and the many things she did trying to turn chaos into triumph. The whole thing came apart when the President put Bremer in and pushed Garner out. The defining aspect of this book is when Olson lays out a few serious missteps that cost her advancement without compromise to her character. There's really no other book around that lays out the daunting challenges Garner had to overcome, once Baghdad was captured. Whereas Bremer kept his own counsel close to his chest, Garner's strong suit was concensus building. Unfortunately for him--and maybe for the rest of us, too--he wasn't in place long enough to make a dent. Olson too comes across as the woman for her times.
Iraq on a human scale October 16, 2006
C. Rousseau (Greensboro, MD)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Kim Olson presents an excellent portrait of life in post-invasion Iraq. Her unique insider viewpoint humanizes the gigantic machine that is the military. Jay Garner's little group earnestly tried to create the infrastructure to fulfill a vague and poorly defined White House mission with little help and even less direction. The mission was nearly guaranteed to be a failure, and the toll it took on Kim was enormous. Her description of her background of 20+ years of military service and success, and her final failure to advance because of political infighting and mistakes and the grudges and discrimination of her superiors is a tale for all women serving in today's military. A moving story of war, the machine that makes it, and its human face is a fascinating read.
 THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD November 3, 2006
ATTICUS (NEW YORK, NY)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Kim Olson's memoir of ORHA, with the backstory of her own struggles in a man's military world, kept me enthralled by the sheer gumption of selfless men and woman who set out against odds. It is a wonder what Garner and his team, including Col. Olson, might have achieved, if only left alone to employ their experience, intelligence, and capture the moment. It wasn't to be, and Olson's account made this reader shake his head in dismay. I want my daughter to read this book as well. There are many lessons here for young women. My only quibble is with the author's purple prose, which somebody should have counseled Olson against. With her story to tell, she did not need to overwrite.
 Iraq and Back May 6, 2007
Michael Rubin (Washington, DC)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
For a month after Baghdad's fall, Gen. Jay Garner's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) led Iraq. Because of length of tenure and also because his successor, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer, cultivated the press which Garner eschewed, ORHA has become little more than a footnote in many accounts. Olson, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, sheds light on this period with Iraq and Back, an account of her time as Garner's executive officer.
Olson's prose is straightforward and unpretentious. As she narrates events, her narrative illustrates ORHA's failure to coalesce. Uniformed military officers disliked civilian counterparts, and the State Department mistrusted anyone who did not hail from the Foreign Service. Olson, like many executive officers, makes instant judgments and boils personalities down into the briefest of descriptions. She noted how Larry DiRita, an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, spent hours on the phone reporting back to his boss but never executed an order for Garner. She had little patience for then-National Security Council official (and, later, ambassador to Baghdad) Zalmay Khalilzad, whom she suggests was an arrogant showboat unconcerned with those around him. State Department official Sherri Kraham, who later married Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani's son, she depicts as fragile, sobbing with fear at the prospect of a helicopter flight.
As Garner's chief aide, Olson was attuned to her boss. She relates his impatience at ORHA's slow deployment to Iraq, at the problems surrounding the establishment of ORHA's palace headquarters, and Garner's subsequent scramble to pay Iraqi pensions. Without such basic equipment as telephones, the hurdles ORHA faced in completing its mission were huge.
However, ORHA's difficulties were not just an absence of equipment but also a lack of guidance. Olson says ORHA received no instructions about Iraqi governance from the White House, State Department, or the Defense Department. While this should lay to rest the canard that the Pentagon sought to impose Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi on Iraq, it does raise questions about Condoleezza Rice. Wasn't it the job of the national security advisor to oversee policy coordination and ensure that no vacuum developed? Because there had been interagency agreement on some policies, had Garner ignored these; did the National Security Council or Pentagon fail to transmit them; or had staff members under Olson simply disregarded them? Regardless, in the absence of instructions on his desk, Garner freelanced, inviting seven prominent Iraqi expatriate leaders into a council. Olson appears unaware that these were the Iraqi leaders chosen by the Iraqi expatriate community after years of negotiation and conferences.
Iraq and Back ends as abruptly as did Garner's tenure. Bremer--the "arrogant jerk" in Olson's words--arrived and casts ORHA aside. He dismisses Garner's fledgling government and orders the sweeping de-Baathification measures Garner had resisted.
While any account of ORHA fills a void, Olson's falls short. Her loyalty to Garner prevents her from asking tough questions about his tenure. How did he make decisions? Why did he publicly embrace high-level Baathists such as Saad al-Janabi, a former aid to Saddam Hussein's sons? Why did he start soliciting political advice from former CIA officials who had moved to Baghdad to form businesses with former Baathist contacts? How did Garner foresee his Iraqi leadership council enforcing decisions down to the municipality? And what interactions did Garner have with U.S. Central Command and U.S. military leaders still operating in Iraq? Nevertheless, Iraq and Back is a good first step at filling in the missing piece of Iraq' post-war narrative.
Michael Rubin
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2007
Very Disappointing! May 9, 2007
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
General Garner, a highly respected leader both within Iraq and the U.S., was asked to leave his civilian job to lead postwar efforts in Iraq. He accepted the challenge, only to quickly be replaced by Ambassador Bremer who immediately made the situation vastly worse. Kim Olson was his Executive Officer - in an excellent position to report key details. Little has been reported to-date on why Garner "failed" and was replaced.
I eagerly picked up "Iraq and Back," looking forward to learning what happened. Unfortunately, the book is almost entirely a short history of Olson's life as a female officer in the Air Force (she is WAY too full of herself), and the remaining material offers no explanations of Garner's frustrations.
That said, it is hard to not be sympathetic to Olson's explanation of how her career crashed, and the difficulties of even paying their African security force.
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