WHY WE LOST: A GENERAL'S INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WARS

摘要

Lt. Gen. (retired) Daniel Bolger opens his book by writing, "I am a United States Army general, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism." As intended, the statement grabs the reader's attention, but the focus of the work is not how one general lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; rather, his underlying theme is that the U.S. military forgot its Sun Tzu in that it did not know the enemy or itself. This dual failure resulted in a series of unrealistic goals that led the United States to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory-or at least from the jaws of good enough. The blame Bolger places on himself and his fellow general officers is that their "lack of humility" prevented them from challenging the underlying assumptions that drove U.S. policy and from challenging their belief that they could transform Iraq and Afghanistan.