Architects of Delusion: Europe, America, and the Iraq War by Simon Serfaty

The graduation of conflict in Iraq in 2003 was once met with quite a few reactions all over the world. In Architects of Delusion, Simon Serfaty provides a ancient research of ways and why the choice to salary conflict was once recommended by way of a few of America's major eu allies, specifically Britain, and hostile via others, particularly France and Germany.

Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac, and Gerhard Schroeder have been, Serfaty argues, the architects of 1 of the main severe crises in postwar transatlantic kin. those 4 heads of nation have been the sufferers not just in their own delusions but in addition of these of the countries they led. all of them performed the hand that their nations had dealt them—the forceful hand of a righteous the USA, the principled acquiescence of a loyal Britain, the decided intransigence of a quarrelsome France, and the ambiguous "new means" of a recast Germany.

Serfaty's deft interweaving of the political histories and cultures of the 4 nations and the personalities in their leaders transcends the Europe-bashing debate sparked via the Iraq invasion. He contends that no longer this type of 4 leaders was once fullyyt correct or completely unsuitable in his method of the others or to the problems, sooner than and through the conflict. For the ensuing wounds to heal, although, and for the continuity of transatlantic kin, he reminds us that the USA and France needs to finish their estrangement, France and Britain needs to get to the bottom of their alterations, Germany needs to hold its weight relative to either France and Britain, and the USA needs to exert an analogous visionary management for the twenty-first century that it confirmed in the course of its upward thrust to preeminence within the 20th century.