This is an angry book. Maj. Steven J. Alvarez (ret.) served in Iraq with the US Army as a public affairs officer (PAO) in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has written a forceful first-hand account of the failure of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Iraqi transitional government to shape public opinion in favor of a more democratic political system. He pulls no punches, calling the CPA informational briefings "chest-beating, feel-good events designed to evoke feelings of U.S. accomplishment and progress in Iraq" (xi); the CPA's message was both biased and aimed at the wrong audience: "the American government was too busy talking to the American media, and the Iraqi government was not talking to anyone," including their own people (xi–xvi). Insurgent elements rushed in to fill the resulting information vacuum.

As a PAO, Alvarez strove "to communicate with the Iraqi masses" as part of a concerted counterinsurgency campaign mapped out by Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, his commanding officer. The early chapters of Selling War concern the US troops' lack of preparation for occupation duties and a demanding "hearts and minds" campaign. An "hour-long cultural-awareness block of instruction" taught by a contractor who, according to Alvarez, was more standup comedian than cultural expert "was supposed to prepare a soldier for a year of interpersonal interaction with Iraqis" (15). When he arrived at the Green Zone in Baghdad, Alvarez was staggered by the "lavish debacle of U.S. overspending on luxuries, … lobster tails, steaks, and ice cream" (19) convoyed in at high risk to hapless US soldiers.[1]

Such wretched excess impeded the CPA's mission to help the Iraqi people, who were suffering deprivations caused by decades of trade sanctions and warfare. The author quickly learned that

In short, Alvarez had too many bosses—and too much red tape to cut through—to do his job effectively.

The author was faced with dishonest PAOs, who "desperately scrounged up metrics [in 2004] for reports, numbers, dollars, megawatts [to show restoration of Iraq's electrical grid], anything that they could use to pad the stellar record of underachievement and hide the fact that a year of valuable time had like sand somehow slipped through their [the CPA's] hands." They were, in a word, "delusional," though very adept at "greasy public relations" (35–37). They didn't fool Iraqis, but they did cover the CPA with a fig leaf as it departed Iraq, its mission unaccomplished.

Alvarez now had a mission of his own:

Such laudable goals were thwarted at almost every turn by American bureaucratic obtuseness or Iraqi intransigence and corruption. The author notes that, first, prior CPA bungling had destroyed the PAOs' credibility. Second, a newly formed Iraqi military hierarchy, obsessed with information control and their own prerogatives, had no interest in engaging with ordinary Iraqis. And, third, even if Iraqis had wanted to speak frankly, the US military did not trust them to say the "right" thing. Efforts to "put an Iraqi face" on the war against the insurgents were ignored or actively undermined, leading Alvarez to conclude, "Fuck, … we are alone in this and surrounded by a sea of clueless motherfuckers" (53).

Undeterred by "the zero-defect, zero-tolerance, ask-for-permission-to-wipe-your-ass world of PAOs" (61), the author started his own blog (a novelty at the time) focusing on Iraqi reconstruction and revealing the warts and blemishes on the Iraqi "face." The blog proved popular and won the support of General Petraeus, who had charge of the Iraqi training mission. Alvarez tends to lionize Petraeus, who could, for example, juggle "about a trillion things" (69), but they made an effective team. So effective, in fact, that, with Alvarez as his PAO, the energetic general hogged the news spotlight in Iraq (79) and elicited a "gag order" from Gen. George William Casey, commander of the Multinational Force. The resultant seven-month silence, in Alvarez's view, hampered efforts to stand up Iraqi forces as a key element in America's "exit strategy" (84).

Alvarez's own attempts to create a small Iraqi media team were undercut by American distrust and Iraqi corruption, leading him to wonder why "so many people [in the chain of command] ignore[d] the president's wishes and public affairs guidance." He speculates that one motive may have been to deny Petraeus "another Newsweek moment" (114). One thing is certain: the United States lost the information war in Iraq because of the dysfunction and confusion that bedeviled the American military's relations with its erstwhile Iraqi partners.

The book reproduces a photograph of Alvarez visiting Iraq's tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad, where he witnessed "two disrespectful U.S. civilians … mountain biking down the tomb's steps and all over the memorial while Iraqi facility protection guards watched."[2] Just imagine the reaction of Americans if the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery were treated so impiously by foreigners, let alone foreign occupiers.

That anecdote raises a question Alvarez fails to address fully: what if the American occupation was not a failure in information warfare? What if the war and its ugly aftermath were simply a case of an unsellable product? When Iraqi leaders were unwilling to recognize forty-nine freshly-minted Iraqi soldiers who had been executed by insurgents as "martyrs to the new Iraq," how could Americans hope to "sell" the virtues of the new Iraqi forces to their countrymen (chap. 7)?

Alvarez in fact provides evidence for an alternative narrative of an undesirable product (the American-led occupation and reconstruction) being hawked by a smiling Iraqi "face" to grimly skeptical and long-suffering Iraqi "buyers." The war, the occupation, and the specious "progress" of US rebuilding efforts had become an outright sham, but one that too many were making money and careers from to protest or replace. Peter Van Buren, a US State Department representative in Iraq, has captured the Potemkin village-like quality of many of US reconstruction projects, all of them heavily hyped as successes in the States even as they crashed and burned in Iraq.[3]

Alvarez did, however, come to recognize Iraq's brutal realities:

Steven Alvarez's unfiltered account of his personal information war in Iraq demystifies an essential aspect of that war and indeed all wars. Selling War is must reading for PAOs, historians of the Iraq war and the modern American military, and indeed anyone interested in war and its perennial first casualty—truth.