We just started the second edition of our new TPMCafe Book Club this mornign.
This week we have author Larry Diamond talking about his new book Squandered Victory, essentially an insider’s account of the poor planning, mismanagement and incompetence that bedevilled the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Diamond is a foreign policy hand with an expertise in democratization and, I think, also a Democrat. But he’s a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. And through that connection, he became friends with Condi Rice.
It was Rice who contacted him about six months after the end of the war to ask if he’d go to Iraq as an advisor to the CPA.
The book is his story of what he saw there. And he’s just started the discussion of the book this morning.
If you’d like to join in and ask Diamond your own questions, stop by.