Posts Tagged ‘Michael Gordon’

Media Center: 'Endgame' by Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor

September 24th, 2012

Jacket photoWHO: Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor

WHAT:
ENDGAME: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama

WHEN: Published by Pantheon September 25, 2012

WHERE: Iraq

WHY:
A peerless work of investigative journalism and historical reconstruction ranging from 2003 to 2012, this book draws on highly classified, still-secret documents, as well as interviews with key figures in both White Houses, the military, the State and Defense Departments, and the intelligence community.

THE ENDGAME also presents the Iraqi perspective on the war, through interviews with Sunni and Shiite leaders, Kurdish politicians, tribal sheikhs, former insurgents, and senior Iraqi military officers, which has been missing from much reporting to date.

Among its many revelations, THE ENDGAME reveals:

• President Obama’s failed 2010 attempt to reshape the Iraqi government in the face of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian bent.

• A detailed account of the infighting between the White House and the military over how many troops to leave in Iraq, tensions that culminated in an angry phone call to the Pentagon’s senior policy official by Thomas Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser.

• A vivid portrayal of the differences between Ambassador Christopher Hill and General Ray Odierno, and the deterioration in civil-military relations that hobbled American policy as American forces began to draw down.

• Classified details of backchannel communications with Iran, in which Iranian Quds Force commander Qasim Suleimani offered to decrease his activities in Iraq if the U.S. released Shiite militant Qais al-Khazali, an offer General David Petraeus refused.

• Details from U.S. intelligence reports of an Iranian military so fearful about a potential Israeli attack that on several occasions it nearly shot down civilian airliners.

• The never-before-revealed infiltration of the U.S.-controlled Baghdad International Airport by the Mahdi Army, in which militia personnel occupied key leadership positions, allowing the Mahdi Army to transport its personnel out of the country while smuggling money and occasionally arms.

• The inside story behind Lieutenant General Stan McChrystal’s special operations task force dedicated to hunting Al-Qaeda leaders and sometimes pursuing Iranian personnel, and details of a secret CIA-backed paramilitary unit.

• Unreported details on tensions among U.S. military commanders in the field, diplomatic and military leaders, Iraqi and American officials, the White House and Pentagon, State Department, and military, all of which taken together paint the complete portrait of how internal struggles affected the waging of this war.

Eagerly anticipated in the wake of national best seller Cobra II (“The superb, must-read military history of the invasion of Iraq”—Thomas L. Friedman), THE ENDGAME is a riveting blow-by-blow chronicle of the fighting as well as a complete look at American, Iraqi, and Iranian objectives, and the diplomatic intrigue and political struggle within Iraq since the American invasion.

Photo of the authors
Media Resources:
About the book | About Michael Gordon | About Bernard Trainor | Download the jacket or the author photo

Publicist for this title:
Erinn Hartman | 212-572-2345 | ehartman@randomhouse.com