Powerful book. I liked it a lot. Two things in particular:

I feel as though Filkins makes a great effort to explain the complicated impact of Saddam Hussein on Iraqi culture. When Bremer et al arrive, they seemed to view Iraq as a clean slate to be written upon. The Forever War, more than many of the books I’ve read, really drives home what it meant to live under a dictatorship and how the countless scores to be settled and long extant divisions in society re-emerged once Hussein was deposed. One source offers a vision of Hussein as a single force to be avoided versus the chaos of Americans, Al Qaida types, Sunni radicals, Shiite radicals, all as potentially dangerous forces.

As a former city school teacher in a tough building, I felt this passage in my bones:

People asked me about the war, of course. They asked me whether it was as bad as people said. “Oh, definitely,” I told them, and then, usually, I stopped. In the beginning I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and I could see their eyes go after a few sentences.