From retired Army Colonel and <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author Andrew J. Bacevich comes a searing reassessment of U.S. military involvement in the Greater Middle East over the past four decades. Connecting the dots in a way no historian has done before, Bacevich describes the pattern of recent American armed interventionism in the Islamic world, combining into a single vivid narrative episodes as varied as the Beirut bombing of 1983, the notorious Mogadishu firefight of 1993, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and today’s ongoing fight against ISIS. By exposing the misjudgments that have marred U.S. military efforts in the Greater Middle East from the very outset, this concise account casts recent U.S. military history in a radically different and deeply troubling new light.