only seventy-four Iraqis: Ibid.
ninety million dollars: Ibid.
invited to attend: David Lightman, “Top Secret,” Hartford Courant, April 2, 2003.
ask questions or request information: “The most valuable part,” Senator Levin was quoted as saying in the New York Times, “is you can ask questions, you can press for information” (Carl Hulse and Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Strokes Lawmakers Every Morning, and They Seem to Like It,” New York Times, March 29, 2003).
while Levin had not: “Vote Summary on the Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 114).”
mulling plans to attack: The first briefing delivered to the chiefs of staff in “the Tank” (where they convene) occurred on Memorial Day, May 27, 2002. Micah Zenko writes an account of the briefing in Between Threats and War (Stanford University Press, 2010), 97.
lower limit of the No Fly Zone: Ibid., 98.
in Europe and perhaps beyond: When this facility was attacked and captured, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers suggested on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer that the facility was the source of the ricin and terrorist operatives implicated in the 2002 Wood Green ricin plot to attack the London subway. “U.S. Troops Search for Chemical Biological Weapons,” Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, March 31, 2003.
dispatching American bombers: Zenko, Between Threats and War, 98.
inserting a ground force: Ibid., 100.
attacking the Hussein regime: Ibid., 106
larger force package than envisioned: Ibid., 100.
equipment Ansar al-Islam had used: Ibid., 108–109.
soldiers and their families: Robert F. Worth, “Extension of Stay in Iraq Takes Toll on Morale of G.I.’s,” New York Times, July 19, 2003.
more Americans had died: Sergio Vieira, “U.S. Deaths in Postwar Iraq Equal to Those in Conflict,” CNN, August 25, 2003.
CHAPTER 7: THROUGH THE HOURGLASS
drove through a field: R. Jeffrey Smith, “After 10 Months in Iraq, U.S. Marks 500th Military Death,” Washington Post, January 18, 2004.
another eight times over: At the time of writing, 4,486 Americans had died in the Iraq war, according to icasualties.org.
“responsibility and duty and engagements”: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Vintage, 2008), 41.
four square miles: William Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone,” Atlantic, November 2004.
busts from their perches: Joel Brinkley, “A Joyful Palace Event: Four Heads Roll in Baghdad, and All of Them Are Hussein’s,” New York Times, December 3, 2003.
rebuilding the stock market: George Packer’s description of the palace is unfortunately quite accurate: “Amid the grotesque faux-baroque furnishings, the palace was a hive of purposeful activity. . . . Most of them seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad. . . . Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.” George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 183–84. See also Yochi J. Dreazen, “How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2004.