"Four days before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, someone leaked American contingency war plans to the Chicago Tribune. The small splash the story made was overwhelmed by the shock waves caused by the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet anchored in Hawaii-but the ripples never subsided, growing quietly but steadily across the Cold War, Vietnam, the fall of Communism, and into the present. Ripped from today's headlines, Lloyd C. Gardner's latest book...

Bibliographic notes and index.

In this stunning new narrative of the road to America's "new longest war," one of the nation's premier diplomatic historians excavates the deep historical roots of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq. Lloyd Gardner's sweeping and authoritative narrative places the Iraq War in the context of U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam, casting the conflict as a chapter in a much broader story in sharp contrast to the host of recent accounts, which focus almost exclusively...