In Squandered victory, Stanford professor Larry Diamond provides a provocative and vivid inside account of the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq- and how it was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. He reveals how ideals were often trumped by power politics and U.S. officials routinely issued edicts that later had to be squared (at great cost) with Iraqi realities. In a new afterword, he weighs the prospects and conditions for stabilizing Iraq and shows how American policy since the handover of power has failed to overcome the shortsighted choices made during the fourteen months of the American occupation and the subsequent interim government.