Revered for his strength of character and his willful defiance of Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill is cherished as one of World War II's most heroic figures. His legacy during one of the darkest eras in human history paints a portrait of the man as a wonderful, larger-than-life personality - a characterization that overshadows his faults and his foibles in those cruicial years.

But those faults and foibles had a devastating legacy of their own.

Winston Churchill: The Flawed Genius of World War II examines the decisions and policies Churchill made in the vital months between June 1940 and December 1941 that hindered more than helped the Allied cause. With profound insight into Churchill's early colonial experiences as well as his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty, Christopher Catherwood offers an honest appraisal of the strategies in a unique and fascinating perspective that separates the myth from the man.

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Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq
by Christopher Catherwood

As Britain’s colonial secretary in the 1920s, Winston Churchill made a mistake with calamitous consequences and unseen repercussions extending into the twenty-first century. Christopher Catherwood, scholar and adviser to Tony Blair’s government, examines Churchill’s creation of the artificial monarchy of Iraq after World War One, forcing together unfriendly peoples — Sunni Muslim Kurds and Arabs, and Shiite Muslims — under a single ruler.

Defying a global wave of nationalistic sentiment and the desire of subjugated peoples to rule themselves, Churchill put together the broken pieces of the Ottoman Empire and unwittingly created a Middle Eastern powder keg. Inducing Arabs under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks to rebel against rule from Constantinople, the British during WWI convinced the Hashemite clan that they would rule over Syria. However, Britain had already promised the territory to the French. To make amends after the Great War, Churchill created the nation called Iraq and made the Hashemite leader, Feisel, king of a land to which he had no connections. Catherwood examines Churchill’s decision, which resulted in a 1958 military coup against the Iraqi Hashemite government and a series of increasingly bloody regimes until the ultimate nightmare of Ba’athist party rule under Saddam Hussein.