There’s always been a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to Thomas Friedman’s work—one moment he’s smart and decent, the next smarmy, belligerent and glib. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has one of the more irritating styles in American punditry, combining regular-guy banalities, endlessly repeated neologisms and subtle condescension (such as when he refers to Doha, Qatar, as a city "you may have never heard of"). He opines against the destructive insanity of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, then urges an even more destructive and insane American approach to the Arab world. (As he famously told Charlie Rose last year, the Iraq war was justified because Americans needed to burst a putative "terrorism bubble" by going into the Middle East, taking out a "very big stick" and saying, "Suck. On. This.")

Mr. Friedman’s split personality is much in evidence in his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, which is a strange combination of rational apocalypticism and irrational optimism. He credibly explains just how much trouble the world is in due to the interlocking problems of global warming, resource shortages and population growth, all auguring a cavalcade of catastrophe. This is the kind of warning that serious environmentalists and peak-oil theorists have been issuing for years, and if Mr. Friedman can mainstream it, he’ll be doing a tremendous service.

But the good he accomplishes in the first half is pretty much undone in the second. After provoking the reader’s anxiety, he salves it by assuring us that we won’t have to change our lifestyle in any significant way, because, properly directed, American capitalism will invent a bountiful, cheap and clean source of energy (although right now no one has any idea where such a breakthrough might come from). Having set up a clear-eyed picture of the dangers we face, one that challenges the reader to grasp the potential scale of impending environmental calamity, he retreats into magical thinking. In so doing, he reinforces the very complacency he means to confront.

"AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM," he writes, "and the world has a problem." America’s problem is its defensive, post-9/11 insularity, its drift and lack of national purpose. The world’s problem is that it "is getting hot, flat and crowded. That is, global warming, the stunning rise of the middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable. In particular, the convergence of hot, flat, and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change." Both problems, Mr. Friedman argues, have the same solution: "I am convinced that the best way for America to solve its big problem—the best way for America to get its ‘groove’ back—is for us to take the lead in solving the world’s big problem."

That’s all very good. It would be a wonderful and world-changing thing if the United States would ditch the thuggish, know-nothing environmental intransigence of the Bush years and become a world leader in combating climate change and promoting sustainable energy. And Mr. Friedman makes a convincing case that doing so could reinvigorate the American economy, promoting innovations that would find buyers worldwide.

The catch is that right now, there aren’t any new energy sources that will allow the United States to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and keep consuming the way we do. Mr. Friedman acknowledges this: "All the advances we have made so far in wind, solar, geothermal, solar thermal, hydrogen, and cellulosic ethanol are incremental, and there has been no breakthrough in any other energy source. Incremental breakthroughs are all we’ve had, but exponential is what we desperately need." And yet he won’t advocate any scaling down of American appetites. Quite the opposite: He imagines a future where, with the right innovations, life in America will be even more convenient, even more full of cool gadgets and easy motoring than it is today, with none of it coming at any other country’s expense.

He devotes a dozen pages of Hot, Flat and Crowded to a rosy description of a day in the life of tomorrow’s American citizen: "Your alarm goes off at 6:37 a.m., playing the Beatles classic ‘Here Comes the Sun’ just as you programmed it to the night before from 10,000 wake-up songs offered by your utility in collaboration with your phone company and iTunes. You have no alarm clock. The music was actually playing out of your home phone speaker, which itself is integrated into your home Smart Black Box—or SBB as it is called." He goes on to explain how this SBB will regulate the use of energy within the house, cutting waste and expenses. Similarly, in Mr. Friedman’s future, cars not only run on electricity—they’re called RESUs, or "rolling energy storage units," and actually sell excess power back to the utilities while they’re parked, meaning people drive "for the equivalent of about $1.50 a gallon." Meetings with international clients are held via hologram. The electricity to run this techno-utopia comes courtesy of some unspecified new invention.

Perhaps this cheery vision is necessary in order to convince people to support environmentally sustainable policies, but it’s also dishonest. There’s absolutely no guarantee that innovation will save us. Miraculous inventions are always possible, but such discoveries don’t come on demand—if they did, we’d have cured both cancer and AIDS by now. Already, Americans don’t take the possibility of real scarcity seriously, because they assume someone, somewhere will come up with a technological fix. Thomas Friedman is encouraging that illusion.

THERE'S A DEEPER KIND of denial at work here as well, one that avoids grappling with the fact that the globalization Mr. Friedman loves to celebrate has both winners and losers. Early in the book he points to the steadily rising cost of food, which is partly the result of the diversion of grains into biofuels and the growth of a global middle class with a voracious appetite for meat. As Paul Roberts reminds us in The End of Food, it takes 4.5 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken, and 20 pounds of grain to make a pound of beef. The world cannot support billions of people who eat as much meat as Americans do, and as more and more aspire to, food will likely turn into another ever-dearer commodity in an insatiable international marketplace. Hunger will increase, and more rainforests will be cut down to make way for more agricultural land, exacerbating the global warming and loss of biodiversity that are among Mr. Friedman’s major themes.

Yet after mentioning food shortages, he seems to forget about them, ignoring the fact that even if some limitless source of clean power were discovered, people wouldn’t be able to eat it. Besides, as the U.N. has pointed out, livestock contributes even more to global greenhouse gas emissions than transportation does. To acknowledge this, though, is to acknowledge a problem that can’t be solved by even the most creative capitalist.

At times, Mr. Friedman seems to want to warn his readers that dark times might be ahead, but he keeps pulling back, as if by habit. He ends up telling them what they probably want to hear: that with the right investments and leadership, Americans needn’t seriously change how we live, and that the developing world can join us in luxury. Again, maybe presenting the specter of environmental cataclysm as a fabulous new business opportunity is smart salesmanship, but it’s an analytical cop-out. It allows Mr. Friedman to avoid the most crucial of political questions—how we decide who gets what in a world of limited resources, where we can’t take more than our share and have enough to go around.

Michelle Goldberg’s new book, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, Population and the Future of the World, will be published by The Penguin Press in April 2009. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

Most readers, especially those familiar with Mr. Goldberg’s riveting New Yorker dispatches from the Middle East, will assume that the charge is absurd, but it turns out to be slightly less far-fetched than it at first appears. “We know you were in Ketziot,” Mr. Goldberg’s interrogator says. It’s not immediately clear what Ketziot is, but Mr. Goldberg writes: “My face gave away the game. My double life in Gaza had just come to an end.”

Ketziot, we soon learn, was a desert prison used during the first Intifada, “a city of barbed wire, moldy tents, machine gun towers, armored personnel carriers, black oil smoke, sullen Arabs, and embittered Israeli soldiers.” One of those embittered soldiers was the author, and his experience there is the fulcrum of Prisoners.

A rich, large-hearted and melancholy political bildungsroman, the book tells the story of Jeffrey Goldberg’s evolution from “the Moshe Dayan of the Howard T. Herber Middle School,” an alienated American boy besotted with dreams of Sabra strength, to a worldly, somewhat disillusioned journalist drawn to chronicle Israel’s fiercest enemies. At the center of Mr. Goldberg’s tale is his unlikely friendship with a Palestinian he guarded at Ketziot, a relationship that endures but also, inevitably, lets him down, mirroring the Jewish left’s growing despair about the Palestinians they hope to make peace with.

The book takes us into a vertiginous moral universe in which victims and oppressors keep switching places and liberal universalism collides with tribal loyalties. It’s a fascinating tour through recent Israeli history—Mr. Goldberg has interviewed everyone, and most of the region’s big players, including Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, make appearances. The author has a novelistic gift for conjuring the optimism of the Oslo era, which makes the nihilistic nosedive of the second Intifada even more searing. But while Prisoners is a story of multiple disenchantments, there’s a defiant hopefulness about it—a faith, despite too much evidence to the contrary, that individual human understanding can transcend historic hatreds.

Were Prisoners a novel, Ketziot might seem too obvious a symbol of brute absurdity. Mr. Goldberg writes of a Passover Seder there: “Here we were, celebrating Jewish freedom in a prison filled with our Arab captives! We had built a prison and planted it right along the pathway of Jewish freedom, and we had filled its cages with Palestinians who were demanding only what Jews themselves demanded, in the time of the Exodus and today: freedom.” He immediately reproached himself for thinking this way, but the reader can sense his pure Zionist faith curdling.

The son of liberal New York Jews, Mr. Goldberg began his adult life in defiant flight from the humanistic, self-interrogating culture of the Diaspora. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the role of Muslim humiliation in fueling the miseries of the Middle East. The part played by traumatized Jewish pride gets rather less attention, though as Prisoners suggests, it’s essential to understanding Israel’s lionization of strength and power. As a young man, Mr. Goldberg saw Diaspora Jews as emasculated, gelded by history. He embraced Israeli militarism with a zeal born, at least in part, of self-hatred. “I was determined to be an Israeli man, not an American Jew,” he writes. To his credit, though, Mr. Goldberg was never able to shake off the values he was raised with. He remained a yafei nefesh, a derisive Israeli phrase that means “beautiful soul,” or bleeding heart. He hated the petty cruelties of Ketziot, writing at one point, “All my life I wanted to be a Freedom Rider. Now I felt like Bull Connor.”

Mr. Goldberg sought a sort of redemption in friendship with a prisoner, Rafiq Hijazi, a pious but open-minded member of Fatah. “I had consoling thoughts about Rafiq—thoughts about the thickening possibilities of peace, a peace that could be made first by two inconsequential soldiers. If Rafiq Hijazi could somehow extend the border of his compassion to take in Jeffrey Goldberg, then why should peace be impossible?” The two men’s fraught relationship is the heart of the book, even though it often seems too fragile a connection to hold all of the hopes the author piles onto it. Though he doesn’t write it, and maybe doesn’t even think it, Mr. Goldberg appears to have wanted expiation from Mr. Hijazi for the sins of the occupation. He also desperately wanted evidence that there are Palestinian activists who can accept coexistence with Israel, a precondition for peace.

Prisoners, of course, comes at a time when such evidence is rare, and the book is full of disappointment, even heartbreak. When the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti first appears in the book, he’s introduced as “mercilessly self-critical in a very un-Palestinian way … a favorite of the Israeli left, a prized interlocutor of liberal Knesset members.” He appears in the story again a few years later, during the height of the second Intifada, shouting of martyrdom and working in a residential building where families with children serve as human shields from Israeli assassination attempts. Similarly, Mr. Hijazi is not quite the exemplar of Palestinian moderation that Mr. Goldberg longed to find. At one point we learn that he took part in a Gaza demonstration against suicide bombing, but during a heated argument after Sept. 11, he says, “I wouldn’t go to that rally today.” Mr. Hijazi ended up moving to the U.S. to study statistics at American University, but his encounter with our louche mores only served to strengthen his commitment to conservative Islam. By the end of the book, Mr. Hijazi’s wife—whom Mr. Goldberg had previously befriended—is veiled and either won’t or can’t talk to him.

But the friendship somehow carries on despite all of this, and it remains a source of optimism for writer and reader alike. “If this could be done between a million different people, then the situation would be a lot different,” Mr. Hijazi says during their last meeting in Prisoners. “People would at least know what the other person thinks.” Jeffrey Goldberg is too sophisticated to believe that friendships like theirs can, on their own, save the world. “An irreducible truth remained: The maximum Israel could give did not match the minimum the Palestinians would accept,” he writes. Nevertheless, the image of the former guard and his onetime captive having an affectionate political argument in an Abu Dhabi Starbucks offers some hope in the face of desolation.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.

Most readers, especially those familiar with Mr. Goldberg’s riveting New Yorker dispatches from the Middle East, will assume that the charge is absurd, but it turns out to be slightly less far-fetched than it at first appears. “We know you were in Ketziot,” Mr. Goldberg’s interrogator says. It’s not immediately clear what Ketziot is, but Mr. Goldberg writes: “My face gave away the game. My double life in Gaza had just come to an end.”

Ketziot, we soon learn, was a desert prison used during the first Intifada, “a city of barbed wire, moldy tents, machine gun towers, armored personnel carriers, black oil smoke, sullen Arabs, and embittered Israeli soldiers.” One of those embittered soldiers was the author, and his experience there is the fulcrum of Prisoners.

A rich, large-hearted and melancholy political bildungsroman, the book tells the story of Jeffrey Goldberg’s evolution from “the Moshe Dayan of the Howard T. Herber Middle School,” an alienated American boy besotted with dreams of Sabra strength, to a worldly, somewhat disillusioned journalist drawn to chronicle Israel’s fiercest enemies. At the center of Mr. Goldberg’s tale is his unlikely friendship with a Palestinian he guarded at Ketziot, a relationship that endures but also, inevitably, lets him down, mirroring the Jewish left’s growing despair about the Palestinians they hope to make peace with.

The book takes us into a vertiginous moral universe in which victims and oppressors keep switching places and liberal universalism collides with tribal loyalties. It’s a fascinating tour through recent Israeli history—Mr. Goldberg has interviewed everyone, and most of the region’s big players, including Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Hamas co-founder Abdel Aziz Rantisi, make appearances. The author has a novelistic gift for conjuring the optimism of the Oslo era, which makes the nihilistic nosedive of the second Intifada even more searing. But while Prisoners is a story of multiple disenchantments, there’s a defiant hopefulness about it—a faith, despite too much evidence to the contrary, that individual human understanding can transcend historic hatreds.

Were Prisoners a novel, Ketziot might seem too obvious a symbol of brute absurdity. Mr. Goldberg writes of a Passover Seder there: “Here we were, celebrating Jewish freedom in a prison filled with our Arab captives! We had built a prison and planted it right along the pathway of Jewish freedom, and we had filled its cages with Palestinians who were demanding only what Jews themselves demanded, in the time of the Exodus and today: freedom.” He immediately reproached himself for thinking this way, but the reader can sense his pure Zionist faith curdling.

The son of liberal New York Jews, Mr. Goldberg began his adult life in defiant flight from the humanistic, self-interrogating culture of the Diaspora. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the role of Muslim humiliation in fueling the miseries of the Middle East. The part played by traumatized Jewish pride gets rather less attention, though as Prisoners suggests, it’s essential to understanding Israel’s lionization of strength and power. As a young man, Mr. Goldberg saw Diaspora Jews as emasculated, gelded by history. He embraced Israeli militarism with a zeal born, at least in part, of self-hatred. “I was determined to be an Israeli man, not an American Jew,” he writes. To his credit, though, Mr. Goldberg was never able to shake off the values he was raised with. He remained a yafei nefesh, a derisive Israeli phrase that means “beautiful soul,” or bleeding heart. He hated the petty cruelties of Ketziot, writing at one point, “All my life I wanted to be a Freedom Rider. Now I felt like Bull Connor.”

Mr. Goldberg sought a sort of redemption in friendship with a prisoner, Rafiq Hijazi, a pious but open-minded member of Fatah. “I had consoling thoughts about Rafiq—thoughts about the thickening possibilities of peace, a peace that could be made first by two inconsequential soldiers. If Rafiq Hijazi could somehow extend the border of his compassion to take in Jeffrey Goldberg, then why should peace be impossible?” The two men’s fraught relationship is the heart of the book, even though it often seems too fragile a connection to hold all of the hopes the author piles onto it. Though he doesn’t write it, and maybe doesn’t even think it, Mr. Goldberg appears to have wanted expiation from Mr. Hijazi for the sins of the occupation. He also desperately wanted evidence that there are Palestinian activists who can accept coexistence with Israel, a precondition for peace.

Prisoners, of course, comes at a time when such evidence is rare, and the book is full of disappointment, even heartbreak. When the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti first appears in the book, he’s introduced as “mercilessly self-critical in a very un-Palestinian way … a favorite of the Israeli left, a prized interlocutor of liberal Knesset members.” He appears in the story again a few years later, during the height of the second Intifada, shouting of martyrdom and working in a residential building where families with children serve as human shields from Israeli assassination attempts. Similarly, Mr. Hijazi is not quite the exemplar of Palestinian moderation that Mr. Goldberg longed to find. At one point we learn that he took part in a Gaza demonstration against suicide bombing, but during a heated argument after Sept. 11, he says, “I wouldn’t go to that rally today.” Mr. Hijazi ended up moving to the U.S. to study statistics at American University, but his encounter with our louche mores only served to strengthen his commitment to conservative Islam. By the end of the book, Mr. Hijazi’s wife—whom Mr. Goldberg had previously befriended—is veiled and either won’t or can’t talk to him.

But the friendship somehow carries on despite all of this, and it remains a source of optimism for writer and reader alike. “If this could be done between a million different people, then the situation would be a lot different,” Mr. Hijazi says during their last meeting in Prisoners. “People would at least know what the other person thinks.” Jeffrey Goldberg is too sophisticated to believe that friendships like theirs can, on their own, save the world. “An irreducible truth remained: The maximum Israel could give did not match the minimum the Palestinians would accept,” he writes. Nevertheless, the image of the former guard and his onetime captive having an affectionate political argument in an Abu Dhabi Starbucks offers some hope in the face of desolation.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.

The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami. Free Press, 378 pages, $26.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages, $25.95.

Very few honest people dispute that the Iraq war has become an utter catastrophe. On Aug. 17, The New York Times quoted a “military affairs expert” who’d recently attended a White House briefing on Iraq, and who told the Times reporter: “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy.” The last rickety plank in George W. Bush’s jury-rigged justification for the war is falling apart, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to calm the chaos that America has sown.

Yet if the failure of the war is no longer really debatable, the reasons for the failure are. Many erstwhile war supporters—especially liberals who were more concerned with human rights than W.M.D.’s—have tried to excuse their bad judgment by saying they couldn’t have foreseen how badly the occupation would be run. The war’s opponents, in turn, have angrily dismissed that argument as a pathetic way for hawks to avoid responsibility for the real-world results of their positions. “The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place,” Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias wrote last year in The American Prospect.

There’s some truth there. The war was built on deception and demagoguery, and no matter how it was run, it wouldn’t have protected America from mythical W.M.D. or severed the nonexistent nexus between Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it’s hard to read many of the new books about the Iraq war without being awed by the administration’s ineptitude, and convinced that things didn’t have to be this bad. Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad offer a baroque kaleidoscope of ignorance and arrogance in, respectively, the Department of Defense, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Bush administration. There’s evidence of a striking degree of self-sabotage in these narratives, and of a nearly Stalinist ideological conformity and contempt for empirical truth. If the incompetence dodge lets hawks like Thomas Friedman or Hillary Clinton evade their full measure of blame, the notion that the inferno in Iraq became inevitable the moment the war was launched lets far guiltier people off the hook.

“Here is the hardest question,” writes Mr. Fallows: “How could the administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations?”

Having opposed the war from the beginning, Mr. Fallows doesn’t need to exonerate himself by pleading shock at the war’s mismanagement. Blind into Baghdad, a book collecting his prescient, incisive reporting on Iraq policy for The Atlantic Monthly, begins with a farsighted piece he published before the invasion called “The Fifty-First State,” which sketches a vision of what occupying Iraq might entail. As he writes in the book’s introduction, consistent themes emerged from his prewar interviews with dozens of experts: “how long and difficult, as opposed to quick and easy, an occupation was likely to be; how important sectional and religious differences within Iraq would probably become; and how crucial it was for the new occupying power to ensure, from the very start, that a majority of Iraqis could see the benefits of an improved daily life, through physical security, a restored economy, and such mundane features as reliable electricity and water supplies.”

This passage serves as a retort to the unrepentant neoconservative Fouad Ajami, whose new book is interesting mainly as a reminder of the towering foolishness of the men who dreamed up this war. Mr. Ajami, who was born in Lebanon, tries to excuse America’s maladroit performance in Iraq by suggesting that no one could have predicted how the population would react. “[T]he steady refusal of the Shia to come out, openly and without equivocation, in support of this American project [was] one of the great surprises of the expedition into Iraq,” he writes, as if everyone had shared the ahistorical optimism of his clique.

Mr. Ajami’s book is likely to be embraced by conservative war supporters trying to rationalize the horror unleashed in Iraq. It’s a mendacious, revisionist defense of the neoconservative position posing as a melancholy lament for Iraq’s benighted Arabs. Mr. Ajami’s title, The Foreigner’s Gift, is wholly without irony. He faults the Iraqis for their “willfulness”—a word he uses repeatedly—and their ingratitude. He lionizes Ahmed Chalabi, attributing his troubles to threatened Sunni autocrats and their sympathizers in the C.I.A. and State Department. His very language is corrupted by propaganda—he uses the obnoxious Fox News phrase “homicide bomber” instead of the more descriptive “suicide bomber.”

To read this book is to realize how magical thinking utterly fogged the minds of the neocons. Despite Mr. Ajami’s claims, the difficulties facing America in Iraq should have come as no great surprise. What is surprising, though, is that a government full of educated and cunning men implemented no plans to deal with these difficulties. The second and third pieces in the Fallows book, “Blind into Baghdad” and “Bush’s Lost Year,” appeared in 2004; two years later, they remain startling in their depiction of an administration rigid in its refusal to prepare for any scenario that didn’t dovetail with its ideology. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been doctrinally opposed to the kind of planning that might have prevented post-invasion problems. Mr. Fallows quotes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, talking about his boss’ obsession with “uncertainty” and his weird hostility to predictions. “If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, ‘Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need to plan for.’ If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld’s office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, ‘Let me tell you what something’s going to look like in the future,’ you wouldn’t get to your next sentence!”

The disasters and confusion recounted in Fiasco and Imperial Life in the Emerald City both follow from this criminally irresponsible aversion to planning. Both books are riveting and infuriating, and do much to fill in the details of the occupation’s misadventures and tragedies.

Mr. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning military reporter and a senior Pentagon correspondent at The Washington Post, tells his story through the words of hundreds of soldiers, so that Fiasco reads like an oral history of the war. Like almost all reporters, he deeply admires the troops, but his military expertise gives him the confidence to make stinging judgments about the conduct of some officers and their divisions as well as of the civilians in the Department of Defense. “The U.S. Army in Iraq—incorrect in its assumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy—completed the job of creating the insurgency,” he writes.

Like other critics of the war, Mr. Ricks faults the Pentagon for not sending enough troops into Iraq. He depicts L. Paul Bremer—who replaced Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as head of the occupation—as a control freak who, ignoring expert advice, spurred the insurgency with his rash decisions to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to purge Baathists from public jobs. “Every insurgency faces three basic challenges as it begins: arming, financing, and recruiting,” he writes. Finding new members “is usually the most difficult of tasks for the insurgent cause,” but by disenfranchising tens of thousands of former soldiers and government workers, he argues, the United States offered its opponents a rich pool of enraged men on which to draw.

The American military also did its part, with mass arrests, indiscriminate destruction and the kidnapping of suspected insurgents’ wives and children—apparently a widespread practice. Without direction from above, divisions went their own way. Some—especially the 101st Airborne under the much-lauded Maj. Gen. David Petraeus—performed admirably. Others did not. According to Mr. Ricks, the Fourth Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, which operated in the northern part of the Sunni triangle, was especially brutal. Mr. Ricks quotes an Army intelligence officer saying, “I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.” (Mr. Ajami’s portrayal of Major General Odierno is, of course, wholly flattering).

NO AMOUNT O PLANNING CAN ERASE the uglier realities of war. But as Mr. Ricks makes clear, there was an almost total lack of counterinsurgency training for Iraq—a result of the administration’s refusal to admit that an insurgency was possible. “The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops,” he writes.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book takes readers inside a hermetically sealed world governed by such fantasies: Baghdad’s Green Zone. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is another profoundly maddening book. To read it is to understand how Mao’s regime could celebrate the successes of the Great Leap Forward while millions of Chinese starved. Mr. Chandrasekaran shows us an American occupation in thrall to a Bush leadership cult, dismissive of experience and expertise and obsessed with doctrinal purity. He describes how potential hires were quizzed on their view of Roe v. Wade, and how young right-wingers were employed based on résumés they’d sent to the Heritage Foundation, then assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. Free traders and anti-tax crusaders with no experience in the developing world gleefully tried to remake Iraq’s economy in line with their dogma.

In one typical instance, a major G.O.P. donor named Thomas Foley arrived in Baghdad to oversee private-sector development. He told a contractor about his plans to privatize all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within 30 days. The contractor pointed out that international law forbids an occupation government from selling off assets. Mr. Chandrasekaran reports that Mr. Foley replied, “I don’t care about any of that stuff …. I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”

Perhaps everyone should have known that the administration would send people like that to Iraq. In retrospect, though, what’s most striking about the failed occupation is the extent to which the war planners put ideology over self-interest. It would have been good for Mr. Bush’s Presidency if he could have improved Iraq—but it seems the administration couldn’t behave decently even when doing so was politically advantageous.

I WASN'T FOR THE WAR, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stand totally against it either, because I thought it might give Iraqis a chance at a better life. Saddam’s viciousness was perhaps the only thing that Mr. Bush didn’t exaggerate, and many of the Iraqi exiles I spoke to before the war were hoping for an invasion despite their distrust of American motives. I visited Baghdad for a couple of weeks in May of 2003, right after the occupation began. Back then, you could still drive around the streets, go to cafés and visit Iraqis’ houses. Mixed up with anger and suspicion and anxiety about the new order, there was a palpable sense of hope. The lack of electricity was debilitating, but everyone expected it to be back on soon. Whatever one thought of the Americans, few then doubted their mechanical know-how, their basic competence.

The electrical supply isn’t much better now than it was three years ago. I’m shamed by my former ambivalence about a war that has turned Iraq from a gulag into an abattoir. I wish I’d been full-throated in my opposition. But to say it had to be this way is to downplay the scope of the administration’s scandalous mismanagement and zealous blundering. The White House didn’t just make one massive mistake in going into Iraq. It made thousands.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.

The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami. Free Press, 378 pages, $26.

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages, $25.95.

Very few honest people dispute that the Iraq war has become an utter catastrophe. On Aug. 17, The New York Times quoted a “military affairs expert” who’d recently attended a White House briefing on Iraq, and who told the Times reporter: “Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy.” The last rickety plank in George W. Bush’s jury-rigged justification for the war is falling apart, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to calm the chaos that America has sown.

Yet if the failure of the war is no longer really debatable, the reasons for the failure are. Many erstwhile war supporters—especially liberals who were more concerned with human rights than W.M.D.’s—have tried to excuse their bad judgment by saying they couldn’t have foreseen how badly the occupation would be run. The war’s opponents, in turn, have angrily dismissed that argument as a pathetic way for hawks to avoid responsibility for the real-world results of their positions. “The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place,” Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias wrote last year in The American Prospect.

There’s some truth there. The war was built on deception and demagoguery, and no matter how it was run, it wouldn’t have protected America from mythical W.M.D. or severed the nonexistent nexus between Saddam and Al Qaeda. But it’s hard to read many of the new books about the Iraq war without being awed by the administration’s ineptitude, and convinced that things didn’t have to be this bad. Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and James Fallows’ Blind into Baghdad offer a baroque kaleidoscope of ignorance and arrogance in, respectively, the Department of Defense, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Bush administration. There’s evidence of a striking degree of self-sabotage in these narratives, and of a nearly Stalinist ideological conformity and contempt for empirical truth. If the incompetence dodge lets hawks like Thomas Friedman or Hillary Clinton evade their full measure of blame, the notion that the inferno in Iraq became inevitable the moment the war was launched lets far guiltier people off the hook.

“Here is the hardest question,” writes Mr. Fallows: “How could the administration have thought that it was safe to proceed in blithe indifference to the warnings of nearly everyone with operational experience in modern military occupations?”

Having opposed the war from the beginning, Mr. Fallows doesn’t need to exonerate himself by pleading shock at the war’s mismanagement. Blind into Baghdad, a book collecting his prescient, incisive reporting on Iraq policy for The Atlantic Monthly, begins with a farsighted piece he published before the invasion called “The Fifty-First State,” which sketches a vision of what occupying Iraq might entail. As he writes in the book’s introduction, consistent themes emerged from his prewar interviews with dozens of experts: “how long and difficult, as opposed to quick and easy, an occupation was likely to be; how important sectional and religious differences within Iraq would probably become; and how crucial it was for the new occupying power to ensure, from the very start, that a majority of Iraqis could see the benefits of an improved daily life, through physical security, a restored economy, and such mundane features as reliable electricity and water supplies.”

This passage serves as a retort to the unrepentant neoconservative Fouad Ajami, whose new book is interesting mainly as a reminder of the towering foolishness of the men who dreamed up this war. Mr. Ajami, who was born in Lebanon, tries to excuse America’s maladroit performance in Iraq by suggesting that no one could have predicted how the population would react. “[T]he steady refusal of the Shia to come out, openly and without equivocation, in support of this American project [was] one of the great surprises of the expedition into Iraq,” he writes, as if everyone had shared the ahistorical optimism of his clique.

Mr. Ajami’s book is likely to be embraced by conservative war supporters trying to rationalize the horror unleashed in Iraq. It’s a mendacious, revisionist defense of the neoconservative position posing as a melancholy lament for Iraq’s benighted Arabs. Mr. Ajami’s title, The Foreigner’s Gift, is wholly without irony. He faults the Iraqis for their “willfulness”—a word he uses repeatedly—and their ingratitude. He lionizes Ahmed Chalabi, attributing his troubles to threatened Sunni autocrats and their sympathizers in the C.I.A. and State Department. His very language is corrupted by propaganda—he uses the obnoxious Fox News phrase “homicide bomber” instead of the more descriptive “suicide bomber.”

To read this book is to realize how magical thinking utterly fogged the minds of the neocons. Despite Mr. Ajami’s claims, the difficulties facing America in Iraq should have come as no great surprise. What is surprising, though, is that a government full of educated and cunning men implemented no plans to deal with these difficulties. The second and third pieces in the Fallows book, “Blind into Baghdad” and “Bush’s Lost Year,” appeared in 2004; two years later, they remain startling in their depiction of an administration rigid in its refusal to prepare for any scenario that didn’t dovetail with its ideology. Indeed, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been doctrinally opposed to the kind of planning that might have prevented post-invasion problems. Mr. Fallows quotes Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, talking about his boss’ obsession with “uncertainty” and his weird hostility to predictions. “If anybody ever went through all of our records—and someday some people will, presumably—nobody will find a single piece of paper that says, ‘Mr. Secretary or Mr. President, let us tell you what postwar Iraq is going to look like, and here is what we need to plan for.’ If you tried that, you would get thrown out of Rumsfeld’s office so fast—if you ever went in there and said, ‘Let me tell you what something’s going to look like in the future,’ you wouldn’t get to your next sentence!”

The disasters and confusion recounted in Fiasco and Imperial Life in the Emerald City both follow from this criminally irresponsible aversion to planning. Both books are riveting and infuriating, and do much to fill in the details of the occupation’s misadventures and tragedies.

Mr. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize–winning military reporter and a senior Pentagon correspondent at The Washington Post, tells his story through the words of hundreds of soldiers, so that Fiasco reads like an oral history of the war. Like almost all reporters, he deeply admires the troops, but his military expertise gives him the confidence to make stinging judgments about the conduct of some officers and their divisions as well as of the civilians in the Department of Defense. “The U.S. Army in Iraq—incorrect in its assumptions, lacking a workable concept of operations, and bereft of an overarching strategy—completed the job of creating the insurgency,” he writes.

Like other critics of the war, Mr. Ricks faults the Pentagon for not sending enough troops into Iraq. He depicts L. Paul Bremer—who replaced Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as head of the occupation—as a control freak who, ignoring expert advice, spurred the insurgency with his rash decisions to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to purge Baathists from public jobs. “Every insurgency faces three basic challenges as it begins: arming, financing, and recruiting,” he writes. Finding new members “is usually the most difficult of tasks for the insurgent cause,” but by disenfranchising tens of thousands of former soldiers and government workers, he argues, the United States offered its opponents a rich pool of enraged men on which to draw.

The American military also did its part, with mass arrests, indiscriminate destruction and the kidnapping of suspected insurgents’ wives and children—apparently a widespread practice. Without direction from above, divisions went their own way. Some—especially the 101st Airborne under the much-lauded Maj. Gen. David Petraeus—performed admirably. Others did not. According to Mr. Ricks, the Fourth Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, which operated in the northern part of the Sunni triangle, was especially brutal. Mr. Ricks quotes an Army intelligence officer saying, “I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.” (Mr. Ajami’s portrayal of Major General Odierno is, of course, wholly flattering).

NO AMOUNT O PLANNING CAN ERASE the uglier realities of war. But as Mr. Ricks makes clear, there was an almost total lack of counterinsurgency training for Iraq—a result of the administration’s refusal to admit that an insurgency was possible. “The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops,” he writes.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book takes readers inside a hermetically sealed world governed by such fantasies: Baghdad’s Green Zone. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is another profoundly maddening book. To read it is to understand how Mao’s regime could celebrate the successes of the Great Leap Forward while millions of Chinese starved. Mr. Chandrasekaran shows us an American occupation in thrall to a Bush leadership cult, dismissive of experience and expertise and obsessed with doctrinal purity. He describes how potential hires were quizzed on their view of Roe v. Wade, and how young right-wingers were employed based on résumés they’d sent to the Heritage Foundation, then assigned to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. Free traders and anti-tax crusaders with no experience in the developing world gleefully tried to remake Iraq’s economy in line with their dogma.

In one typical instance, a major G.O.P. donor named Thomas Foley arrived in Baghdad to oversee private-sector development. He told a contractor about his plans to privatize all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within 30 days. The contractor pointed out that international law forbids an occupation government from selling off assets. Mr. Chandrasekaran reports that Mr. Foley replied, “I don’t care about any of that stuff …. I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”

Perhaps everyone should have known that the administration would send people like that to Iraq. In retrospect, though, what’s most striking about the failed occupation is the extent to which the war planners put ideology over self-interest. It would have been good for Mr. Bush’s Presidency if he could have improved Iraq—but it seems the administration couldn’t behave decently even when doing so was politically advantageous.

I WASN'T FOR THE WAR, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stand totally against it either, because I thought it might give Iraqis a chance at a better life. Saddam’s viciousness was perhaps the only thing that Mr. Bush didn’t exaggerate, and many of the Iraqi exiles I spoke to before the war were hoping for an invasion despite their distrust of American motives. I visited Baghdad for a couple of weeks in May of 2003, right after the occupation began. Back then, you could still drive around the streets, go to cafés and visit Iraqis’ houses. Mixed up with anger and suspicion and anxiety about the new order, there was a palpable sense of hope. The lack of electricity was debilitating, but everyone expected it to be back on soon. Whatever one thought of the Americans, few then doubted their mechanical know-how, their basic competence.

The electrical supply isn’t much better now than it was three years ago. I’m shamed by my former ambivalence about a war that has turned Iraq from a gulag into an abattoir. I wish I’d been full-throated in my opposition. But to say it had to be this way is to downplay the scope of the administration’s scandalous mismanagement and zealous blundering. The White House didn’t just make one massive mistake in going into Iraq. It made thousands.

Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton) was published in May.

It’s tempered, though, with a sense of the tragic and absurd, because Mr. Bowden’s heroes often fail. Like his famous Black Hawk Down, the story of America’s military fiasco in Mogadishu, Guests of the Ayatollah is the tale of a debacle. Written like a novel and shot through with page-turning suspense, the book tells the story of the 1979 hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran and Delta Force’s calamitous attempted rescue mission—a mission that, thanks to bad weather and mechanical failure, ended in dead soldiers and national ignominy despite barely getting off the ground.

Though Mr. Bowden tries to draw parallels between the Iran hostage crisis and today’s conflagrations, the students who stormed the American embassy in Tehran are surprisingly unlike the terrorists we currently face. The sense of déjà vu comes from descriptions of America sunk in impotence and malaise: “While still ostensibly the leader of the ‘free world,’ the nation suddenly seemed powerless, corrupt, inept and despised,” writes Mr. Bowden. “Many of the bad things people said about us had turned out to be true.”

At well over 600 pages, Guests of the Ayatollah is a big brick of a book, and the amount of research and reporting that must have gone into it are awe-inspiring. It’s crowded with dozens of characters, and the narrative is pieced together from so many different perspectives that it’s hard to keep everyone straight. To recreate the 52 hostages’ 444 days of captivity, Mr. Bowden interviewed them, their relatives, some of their kidnappers and their would-be liberators. He immerses the reader in the late-70’s milieu that allowed the hostage takers to fancy themselves champions of all the world’s oppressed masses, and that led some bien pensant American leftists to agree with them. He works hard to make visceral the hostages’ clammy, maddening boredom, their sudden moments of terror and their tiny, defiant triumphs.

A vast load of detail sometimes weighs the book down: Mr. Bowden spends page upon page describing the routines the hostages developed to fill their empty days. Even so, the story moves remarkably quickly, especially given the relative lack of action, and the fact that most readers know how it all ends.

Guests of the Ayatollah begins in November of 1979, with Iran, as Mr. Bowden writes, “in tumult, in mid-revolution.” In January of that year, a mass public uprising, comprised of both Islamists and secular nationalists, had driven the hated shah from power, and in February, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the revolution, returned to Iran from his exile in France. Months later, it was not yet clear what kind of country Iran was going to become. The provisional government was led by modern men who were locked in a power struggle with the Islamists. As Mr. Bowden shows, the embassy takeover was a key part of the theocrats’ eventual victory.

But despite its momentous importance, the hostage situation seems to have developed almost by accident. Writing of the students who first planned the siege, Mr. Bowden explains, “They would storm the hated U.S. embassy, a symbol of Western imperial domination of Iran, occupy it for three days, and from it issue a series of communiqués that would explain Iran’s grievances against America, beginning with the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 and decades of support for the shah, now a wanted man in Iran accused of looting the nation’s treasury and torturing and killing thousands.”

It’s not quite clear how this relatively innocuous stunt turned into a crisis that kept American diplomats and other embassy employees imprisoned for over a year. The action, undertaken without Khomeini’s approval, was enormously popular—ecstatic crowds danced and celebrated in the street, turning the area around the embassy into a fairground. Seeing the public’s reaction, Khomeini threw his support behind the students. “In a sense, the enthusiastic endorsement of their action had called the students’ bluff,” writes Mr. Bowden. “The overwhelming acceptance of their act trapped them in it; rooted them in the spotlight.” Soon, militants who weren’t among the initial planners began taking over. Documents found at the embassy that referred to Iranian officials became pretexts for purging the hardliners’ enemies. The hostage takers demanded that America return the shah, then being treated for cancer in the United States, to stand trial in Iran. America, refusing, found itself locked in a standoff that would end Jimmy Carter’s Presidency and continue to shape our politics to this day.

Mr. Bowden intends the book to resonate with current events, painting the hostage crisis as the first battle in the war between Islamic extremism and the West. On the opening page is a photograph of one of the hostages being paraded by the embassy gate; his arm is held by a man some have identified as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fanatical current president of Iran. Mr. Bowden repeatedly points to the blindness of those in the West who didn’t understand the emerging Iranian threat because they were used to thinking about nations acting on the basis of self-interest, not eschatological fantasies. The implication, as Iran lurches forward with its nuclear program, is that the country’s leaders are not bound by realism or rationality, and thus not susceptible to containment or deterrence.

Yet Mr. Bowden points out that the Iranian radicals who seized the embassy were nowhere near as depraved as later generations of terrorists. “Given the tragic and brutal progress of the Islamo-fascists in the years since, the videotaped beheadings and horrific mass slaughters, the embassy takeover seems almost polite,” he writes. The hostages’ ordeal was awful, especially since they never knew how it would end, but while the kidnappers were cruel, they weren’t ruthless: They let them have books, fed them decently and allowed occasional visits by clergymen and the Red Cross—and they wanted desperately to be recognized as justified and decent. Their speeches abounded with naïve anticolonialist cant, which they apparently wholeheartedly believed. They released all but one of the African-American hostages, assuming them to be merely oppressed pawns, and were shocked when American blacks didn’t rise up to support their bold strike against the Great Satan.

In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bowden travels to Iran and finds that two of the kidnappers, now married and occupying powerful positions in the government, are investors in an ambitious resort project on the Caspian Sea. “Perhaps,” one of them suggests, “in a few years, we might invite back the Americans we held hostage, and they can all stay at the resort as our guests!” Preposterous as the idea is, it’s difficult to imagine any of today’s jihadists ever conceiving of such a rapprochement. It’s a sign of how grim the world has become that today the terrorists who transfixed America 26 years ago seem almost quaint.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton).

It’s tempered, though, with a sense of the tragic and absurd, because Mr. Bowden’s heroes often fail. Like his famous Black Hawk Down, the story of America’s military fiasco in Mogadishu, Guests of the Ayatollah is the tale of a debacle. Written like a novel and shot through with page-turning suspense, the book tells the story of the 1979 hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran and Delta Force’s calamitous attempted rescue mission—a mission that, thanks to bad weather and mechanical failure, ended in dead soldiers and national ignominy despite barely getting off the ground.

Though Mr. Bowden tries to draw parallels between the Iran hostage crisis and today’s conflagrations, the students who stormed the American embassy in Tehran are surprisingly unlike the terrorists we currently face. The sense of déjà vu comes from descriptions of America sunk in impotence and malaise: “While still ostensibly the leader of the ‘free world,’ the nation suddenly seemed powerless, corrupt, inept and despised,” writes Mr. Bowden. “Many of the bad things people said about us had turned out to be true.”

At well over 600 pages, Guests of the Ayatollah is a big brick of a book, and the amount of research and reporting that must have gone into it are awe-inspiring. It’s crowded with dozens of characters, and the narrative is pieced together from so many different perspectives that it’s hard to keep everyone straight. To recreate the 52 hostages’ 444 days of captivity, Mr. Bowden interviewed them, their relatives, some of their kidnappers and their would-be liberators. He immerses the reader in the late-70’s milieu that allowed the hostage takers to fancy themselves champions of all the world’s oppressed masses, and that led some bien pensant American leftists to agree with them. He works hard to make visceral the hostages’ clammy, maddening boredom, their sudden moments of terror and their tiny, defiant triumphs.

A vast load of detail sometimes weighs the book down: Mr. Bowden spends page upon page describing the routines the hostages developed to fill their empty days. Even so, the story moves remarkably quickly, especially given the relative lack of action, and the fact that most readers know how it all ends.

Guests of the Ayatollah begins in November of 1979, with Iran, as Mr. Bowden writes, “in tumult, in mid-revolution.” In January of that year, a mass public uprising, comprised of both Islamists and secular nationalists, had driven the hated shah from power, and in February, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the revolution, returned to Iran from his exile in France. Months later, it was not yet clear what kind of country Iran was going to become. The provisional government was led by modern men who were locked in a power struggle with the Islamists. As Mr. Bowden shows, the embassy takeover was a key part of the theocrats’ eventual victory.

But despite its momentous importance, the hostage situation seems to have developed almost by accident. Writing of the students who first planned the siege, Mr. Bowden explains, “They would storm the hated U.S. embassy, a symbol of Western imperial domination of Iran, occupy it for three days, and from it issue a series of communiqués that would explain Iran’s grievances against America, beginning with the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 and decades of support for the shah, now a wanted man in Iran accused of looting the nation’s treasury and torturing and killing thousands.”

It’s not quite clear how this relatively innocuous stunt turned into a crisis that kept American diplomats and other embassy employees imprisoned for over a year. The action, undertaken without Khomeini’s approval, was enormously popular—ecstatic crowds danced and celebrated in the street, turning the area around the embassy into a fairground. Seeing the public’s reaction, Khomeini threw his support behind the students. “In a sense, the enthusiastic endorsement of their action had called the students’ bluff,” writes Mr. Bowden. “The overwhelming acceptance of their act trapped them in it; rooted them in the spotlight.” Soon, militants who weren’t among the initial planners began taking over. Documents found at the embassy that referred to Iranian officials became pretexts for purging the hardliners’ enemies. The hostage takers demanded that America return the shah, then being treated for cancer in the United States, to stand trial in Iran. America, refusing, found itself locked in a standoff that would end Jimmy Carter’s Presidency and continue to shape our politics to this day.

Mr. Bowden intends the book to resonate with current events, painting the hostage crisis as the first battle in the war between Islamic extremism and the West. On the opening page is a photograph of one of the hostages being paraded by the embassy gate; his arm is held by a man some have identified as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fanatical current president of Iran. Mr. Bowden repeatedly points to the blindness of those in the West who didn’t understand the emerging Iranian threat because they were used to thinking about nations acting on the basis of self-interest, not eschatological fantasies. The implication, as Iran lurches forward with its nuclear program, is that the country’s leaders are not bound by realism or rationality, and thus not susceptible to containment or deterrence.

Yet Mr. Bowden points out that the Iranian radicals who seized the embassy were nowhere near as depraved as later generations of terrorists. “Given the tragic and brutal progress of the Islamo-fascists in the years since, the videotaped beheadings and horrific mass slaughters, the embassy takeover seems almost polite,” he writes. The hostages’ ordeal was awful, especially since they never knew how it would end, but while the kidnappers were cruel, they weren’t ruthless: They let them have books, fed them decently and allowed occasional visits by clergymen and the Red Cross—and they wanted desperately to be recognized as justified and decent. Their speeches abounded with naïve anticolonialist cant, which they apparently wholeheartedly believed. They released all but one of the African-American hostages, assuming them to be merely oppressed pawns, and were shocked when American blacks didn’t rise up to support their bold strike against the Great Satan.

In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bowden travels to Iran and finds that two of the kidnappers, now married and occupying powerful positions in the government, are investors in an ambitious resort project on the Caspian Sea. “Perhaps,” one of them suggests, “in a few years, we might invite back the Americans we held hostage, and they can all stay at the resort as our guests!” Preposterous as the idea is, it’s difficult to imagine any of today’s jihadists ever conceiving of such a rapprochement. It’s a sign of how grim the world has become that today the terrorists who transfixed America 26 years ago seem almost quaint.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton).