The surge under scrutiny

His latest offering, Iraq Endgame, follows in the vein of They Destroyed Iraq and Called it Freedom, examining the Bush administration's so-called "surge" of troops and its fallout.

It examines the evidence drawn up by the Iraq Study Group in its report at the end of 2006, when James Baker, other diplomats, military experts and oilmen linked to the president's father sought a way out of the military morass.

The group specifically warned that "a new approach" was needed that did not simply imply an escalation of military conflict.

But George W Bush, as ever, took his advice from the same group of discredited neocon extremists, associated with the Project for a New American Century, who had driven the case for invasion from the outset.

At a time when the US people and its armed forces had turned against the war, the president was assisted in his escalation by the pusillanimous attitude of the Democrats in Congress who, despite criticisms of administration policy, were paralysed in the face of fear that Bush would, as he did, designate them as letting down the front-line troops.

Simons documents the failure of the surge, including US insistence, against the wishes of the supposedly independent Maliki government, to divide up Baghdad into a succession of walled sectarian cantons.

And he details the effect that this cantonment has had on women, with obscurantist religious militias ruthlessly enforcing dress and behaviour codes.

In an interesting final chapter, Simons examines the personalities of the joined-at-the-hip war criminals George W Bush and Tony Blair, exploring the role of their religiosity in brooking no doubts or criticism.

Iraq Endgame? is not an easy read, not least for its unrelenting documentation of Iraqi civilian suffering, but it chronicles the unfolding of an avoidable nightmare that, even now, merits the arraignment of its principals in a war crimes court.

JOHN HAYLETT