This is not the happy story of liberating Iraq and replacing dictatorship with democracy President Bush and the mainstream American media would have us believe.

How American Lost Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin; isbn 1-58542-426-9; May 19, 2005, $23.95) tells the story of how the U.S. government squandered, through a series of blunders and brutalities, the goodwill with which most Iraqi’s greeted the American invasion and the elation they felt at the fall of Saddam Hussein.

As President Bush pushed the country toward war with Iraq in the early months of 2003, Pacifica Radio reporter Aaron Glantz warned of the tragic consequences that would follow. But once he arrived in Iraq, the reality he found stunned him. In dozens of interviews, Iraqi citizens spoke of their deep gratitude to the Americans for ousting the dictator who had oppressed them for thirty years. Even Iraqis whose homes had been destroyed and who suffered from the lack of clean water, electricity, and other basic services, felt these sacrifices were worth the freedom America had promised them. Glantz interviewed one man who vowed to name his first son George Bush.

But as the occupation dragged on—as more and more Iraqis were thrown in Abu Ghraib without being charged; as the necessities of daily life, such as drinking water and electricity, went lacking; and as the American army failed to control lootings and rampant street violence—tensions began to rise.

Then, with the spectacular killings and grisly display of four American contractors, those tensions exploded. Instead of negotiating, the United States made the fateful decision to attack Fallujah, a colossal mistake that would enrage even moderate Muslims and turn simmering resentment into armed resistance.

With gripping eyewitness accounts, Glantz takes readers inside Fallujah and shows what embedded reporters failed to reveal—the deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by American Marines and the devastating effects of American bombing in a densely populated city. Glantz shows that ordinary Iraqi civilians—men, women, and children—were shot and killed simply for leaving their houses, or for trying to rescue those who lay wounded in the streets. Even humanitarian aid workers who tried to take the wounded to the hospital in clearly marked ambulances were shot at by American snipers. We learn of one brave couple that held their marriage ceremony with bombs falling around them.

When the fighting in Fallujah was over, after the relentless aerial assault and sniper fire had ceased, 600 Iraqi citizens were dead and America’s status as liberators had been completely destroyed.

It wasn’t just Sunni’s in Fallujah that America attacked. As the same time, U.S. forces shut down Shi’te cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s newspaper, Al-Hawza al-Natiqa (The Spoken Islamic Universe) and accused Sadr himself of murder, which triggered an armed uprising across the Shi’ite South.

Throughout the book, Glantz goes beyond the safety of the heavily protected Green Zone where most reporters remain to get at the truth of life in Iraq under the American occupation: the mass incarcerations, the brutally high levels of civilian casualties, the bombings of mosques, the repression of free speech, and the ongoing failure of contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel to provide Iraqis with water, telephone service, electricity and other basic needs. It is these acts, Glantz shows, that are fueling the insurgency and generating lasting enmity to the American presence in Iraq.

In How American Lost Iraq, we are given—for the first time—the voices of Iraqis themselves, unmediated by Pentagon spokespersons or mainstream news anchors. What they have to tell us, in Aaron Glantz’s moving and courageous book, is a truth that all Americans need to hear.

Aaron Glantz is an independant journalist. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area