Iraqi oil's 15 bloody years

Gary Vogler's memoir of post-invasion Iraq gives context to the many challenges the country still faces

Fifteen years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the notion that it was all an effort to grab oil is firmly entrenched in the popular imagination. Gary Vogler has written a book that sheds some light on the question. He was an oil advisor to the occupying government in 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), and a key player in the efforts to revive Iraq's oil sector after the reins were handed back to Iraqis. By his own counting, he spent 75 months in the country after 2003. Iraq and the Politics of Oil is a candid memoir of years spent devising policy in the Green Zone, fighting political battles with the Pentagon, making friends with Iraqi oilmen and trying to rebuild an oil sect