Nick Baumann.

My current employers are the editors of a prominent magazine that has yet to satisfactorily recant its irrational exuberance about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I trudge to the office every morning dreading each new rationale for the war my colleagues never seem to tire of. The worst part of my predicament is that my coworkers' daily doses of optimism about the quagmire in Iraq are always brilliant and well reasoned. Surrounded on all sides by the misguided, I was forced to retreat to the bookstore, where I scoured the shelves for some ammunition to use in the boardroom.

First, I had to do some background research. For this, I turned to How to Lose a Battle, a collection of short essays edited by Bill Fawcett (Harper, $13.95, 325 pp.). Fawcett and his contributors chart the course of military disasters from the crushing defeat of Darius of Persia at Arbela in 331 BC to the 1954 slaughter of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam.

The contributors explain how--and more importantly, why--Lee lost at Gettysburg, the Russians and Austrians were crushed at Austerlitz, and the Hessians were surprised at Trenton. The strength of the anthology is that every essay manages to be concise and fast-paced without sacrificing narrative drama. If we hope to make the right decisions about Iraq, we must understand why some battles are lost when they might have been won. Fawcett excels in offering the reader an understanding of these historical debacles.

How to Lose a Battle illuminates the full spectrum of calamity against which the Iraq war will be judged, but a layman like me needs more background. To begin to understand the modern Middle East, for example, you have to know something about Islam. In No God but God (Random House, $14.95, 310 pp.), Reza Aslan writes: to do so, it is best to start at the beginning, with a tiny, isolated cube of rock called the Kaaba and a man named Muhammad. This is a tightly woven, cleverly plotted, and impressively argued apology for Aslan's religion. "An apology is a defense," Aslan notes, "and there is no higher calling than to defend one's faith." His thesis is simple: what the Bush administration calls "Islamofascism" is a spillover from a conflict within Islam between reformers and reactionaries. While Aslan acknowledges that the September 11 attacks encouraged the spread of the belief in what Samuel Huntington has called the "clash of civilizations," he sees in those events a catalyst for the Muslim world's continuing reexamination of itself. In tracing the history of his faith from its beginning to the present day, Aslan concludes that reform and the spread of doctrinal relativism are inevitable and good. In its reformation, "Islam's new false idols"--bigotry and fanaticism--will be cleansed from Aslan's faith, just as more than a millennium ago Muhammad cleansed the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca toward which the faithful still turn to pray.

Lawrence Wright is not nearly so optimistic. The focus of his The Looming Tower (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 469 pp.) is Al Qaeda and Islamic radicalism. This impeccably well-researched tome is as close as we are likely to come to an accurate history of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and the organization they founded. Wright conducted hundreds of interviews and includes hundreds of footnotes, but his book never lacks for readability. Thanks to a ceaseless string of personal stories and anecdotes, the reader finishes this book with the distinctly unpleasant sensation of actually knowing bin Laden and his cohorts.

The same sort of personal accounts that make The Looming Tower so disturbing make Cobra II (Pantheon, $27.95, 603 pp.), by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, heartbreaking. Like Wright, Gordon and Trainor rely on hundreds of interviews and on extensive research--including access to thousands of pages of once-classified documents. This leads to revelation after conventional-wisdom-defying revelation about what happened during and following the Iraq invasion. Perhaps most sensational at the time of publication earlier this year was the authors' conclusion that Saddam had lacked weapons of mass destruction for years prior to the invasion, and that he only pretended to have them to stave off rivals. The book's narrative-driven sections, based on interviews with American soldiers, give Cobra II a poignancy and depth that go well beyond breaking news.

The crown jewel of any collection of Iraq retrospectives is Fiasco (Penguin, $27.95, 482 pp.) by Thomas Ricks. Perhaps the most interesting fact about Ricks, a military correspondent for the Washington Post, is his oft-repeated assertion that he "wants to win in Iraq." As a consequence, his condemnation of the administration and the military is even more damning. While I disagree with the author's conclusion that we have to stay in Iraq because every other option is worse, it was the information provided in his book about the failures at all levels of leadership that finally had me winning some arguments with my pro-war colleagues at work. Because he "wants to win," Ricks has understood better than most why we are losing.

Perhaps the biggest lesson gained from my Iraq reading project was that I needed all of these books--the full spectrum--to begin to speak intelligently about the war. Reza Aslan's apology for Islam, Lawrence Wright's biography of Al Qaeda, Gordon, Trainor, and Ricks's histories of the invasion, and Fawcett's engaging and useful cartography of military disasters are all pieces of the same puzzle. No one author is going to be able to provide the definitive take on a subject as confusing and complicated as Iraq. If the Bush administration had only understood that reality, perhaps the authors of these books would not have needed to write them.

Nick Baumann, a former editorial assistant at Commonweal, is an intern at the Economist.