No end of a lesson

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‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of the New York Times and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and sometime military correspondent for the same newspaper. Their access to officials and classified documents is remarkable. They are certainly no apologists, unsurprisingly, coming from the NYT. Their intention is ‘to provide a comprehensive account and rationale of the foreign policy strategy, generalship and fighting … in all its complexity’. They are by no means unsympathetic, however: they do not impute corrupt motives, although their criticism of Donald Rumsfeld echoes that of retired US generals recently. What the account reveals above all is the sheer complexity of, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the correct application of overwhelming force’.