19) The Iraq Study Group Report (.co.uk, .com)

When I dropped in on my old friend Dan Serwer in his office at USIP the other day, he proudly thrust the famous Baker/Hamilton report at me, gloating that over 2 million copies of it had been downloaded. It was only when I looked inside this morning that I realised Dan himself had been the Iraq Study Group’s executive director.

For a main text of less than a hundred pages, aimed exclusively at policy-makers concerned with the question of What Next?, it is not bad – especially the recommendations on better US diplomacy in the region, ie Iran and Syria, and the Israel/Palestine dispute. Shame that doesn’t appear to be happening.

I missed, though, any serious analysis of how the greatest military machine the world has ever known, run by the most powerful democratic state in history, had managed to get itself in this fix in the first place. So it feels very incomplete.