Product Description: It is very easy to get polio. The celebrated Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn was just six years old when he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork, careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in Cork City...read more

Product Description: From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle East’s disintegrationThe Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of today’s Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present...read more

Product Description: How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West's greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.

Product Description: Time magazine listed him as one of its "100 People Who Shape Our World." Newsweek featured him on its cover under the headline "How Al-Sadr May Control U.S. Fate in Iraq." Paul Bremer denounced him as a "Bolshevik Islamist" and ordered that he be captured "dead or alive...read more

Product Description: Whatever else the United States intended when it invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, it was not to hand the country over to a 32-year-old militant cleric who fought against their presence from the start and whom former Iraqi administrator L...read more

Product Description: Whatever else the United States intended when it invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, it was not to hand the country over to a 32-year-old militant cleric who fought against their presence from the start and whom former Iraqi administrator L...read more

This is the first title about Muqtada al-Sadr, the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq, who leads a movement that opposed both Saddam Hussein and the US occupation. The rise of Muqtada has been one of the great surprises of the occupation. At first grossly underestimated by the US, he has become the kingmaker of Iraq and a force that is indispensable to any Iraqi government. His combination of nationalism and religious fervour proved deeply attractive to countless angry and impoverished Iraqi Shia: the Mehdi Army, his devoted militia, now rules half of Baghdad. Far from being the 'firebrand cleric' portrayed in the Western media, Muqtada is an astute and experienced politician who struggles to lead an anarchic mass movement that he only half controls. In a compelling narrative, award-winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn charts the rise of Muqtada. He examines the Shia uprisings; Muqtada's family background (in particular the martyrdom of his father, Mohammed Sadiq, and his father-in-law, Mohammed Baqir, by Saddam Hussein); his leadership of the 70,000-strong Mahdi army; his links to the Iranians; his ambivalent relations with the Iraqi government; and the botched attempt to kill him by the US. Cockburn has reported from Iraq since 1977, often at great personal risk. Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq combines first-hand accounts of his investigations with vivid and dismaying descriptions of the war, and is one of the few books to be based on interviews with Iraqi eyewitnesses. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the tragedy of Iraq - and its potential consequences.

A personal odyssey into the midst of a shattered nation describes the war in Iraq from its inception, through the fall of Saddam Hussein, to the failure of the U.S. occupation, the growing insurgency that threatens all three of the primary Iraqi communities--the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunni--and everyday life in Baghdad.

Product Description: "The idea of direct invasion is the greatest threat to Saddam. It avoids the problems of securing local allies, inside and outside Iraq, which bedevil any indirect approach to get rid of him. But it has one immense disadvantage from the US point of view ...read more

Two respected investigative journalists offer an indepth analysis of the politics of Iraq, the true nature of the regime of Saddam Hussein and his family, and the internecine struggles within the CIA that have disrupted efforts to dislodge Hussein. Reprint.

Looks at the forces shaping modern Soviet society, explains why Western expectations were so far off, and describes how past events have led to these changes