Traces the experiences of an American civilian and educator who traveled to Iraq to help rebuild its once highly regarded educational system, describing his encounters with such individuals as a humanitarian who longs to be American, a university dean who harbors suspicions about the American occupation, and an Iraqi mother whose son has been kidnapped.<br>
  
      
        

  <span>John Agresto spent 
nine months in Iraq—from September 2003 to June 2004—working under 
Ambassador Paul Bremer as senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher 
Education and Scientific Research. His daunting task was to assist 
Iraqis in rebuilding their once distinguished system of colleges, 
universities, and vocational schools. As he left Iraq, Agresto was asked
 by the Pentagon to write a few paragraphs about the “lessons learned” 
during his time there. Those paragraphs were never written, but a book 
was born instead. Mugged by Reality is partly the memoir of an American 
civilian and educator trying to help a devastated country revive its 
educational institutions. It is also a compendium of the successes and 
failures that followed in the wake of Iraq’s liberation. Many books 
discuss what the United States and its allies did or didn’t do, making 
our mistakes look simple in hindsight: we disbanded the army, we didn’t 
have enough troops, we de-Ba’athified too thoroughly. If only we had 
done things differently, they say. But the sober truth is that we have 
been thwarted not simply by failures to “understand the culture of the 
Middle East,” but by failures of Americans in Iraq to understand their 
own culture and what America really stands for. In the end, Mugged by 
Reality offers “lessons learned” not only about Iraq and Middle Eastern 
culture, but also about American democracy and about our common human 
nature</span>

Mugged By Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions PDF

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