It ends, as so many imperial projects do, with a prison. Gaza is not an aberration. It is the end point of the War on Terror, where the fantasies of permanent war, anticipatory violence, and racialised dehumanisation meet their most brutal expression. A captive population is besieged, starved, bombed in full view of the world, and the language used to justify it is depressingly familiar. “Self-defence.” “Eliminating threats.” “Restoring deterrence.” The same phrases were used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen. The same doctrines: pre-emptive war, credible force, the enemy as a civilisational virus. The only real difference is that Gaza makes visible what the War on Terror tried to keep hidden.
From the outset, that war was never just a reaction to 9/11. It was a strategic opportunity to reorder the world. To extend and secure empire under the guise of security. In Iraq, this meant regime change; in Afghanistan, occupation; in Guantánamo, indefinite detention; now in Gaza, elimination. Gaza isn’t Fallujah with better PR, it’s what Fallujah always was, only now there’s no effort to deny it, no shame, no need to pretend, the logic of Rumsfeld and Cheney carried to its endpoint: mass punishment with no horizon for peace, and no cost for the perpetrator. The rules are suspended, the enemy is everywhere, and civilian life is collateral by definition.
This is the world Deadly Betrayal helps us understand. Dennis Fritz, a former senior enlisted advisor in the United States Air Force and a loyal servant of empire for nearly three decades, has produced something rarer than regret: a work of betrayal written by the betrayed. It is not only an insider’s history of the invasion of Iraq, but also a blunt moral reckoning with the ideology that made that war inevitable, and with the system that still survives it.
The betrayal, as Fritz sees it, wasn’t just of the American people or the Constitution. It was of the men and women in uniform, the “boots on the ground” who were told they were fighting for freedom, but were in fact fighting for “credibility,” regional dominance, and the strategic fantasies of neoconservative ideologues. What’s astonishing is not merely that Fritz came to this conclusion, but that he had access to the paper trail. As a member of the Pentagon’s Declassification Review Team, he read the war’s DNA: Rumsfeld’s infamous “snowflakes,” memos, planning documents, and internal briefings that make plain the central thesis of this book. (This was back when “snowflake” in a Republican administration meant a bureaucratic order for war, not a student who got offended.) The war in Iraq was not a miscalculation. It was not a mistake. The neocons had been waiting a decade. This was their war, their chance, their map of the Middle East finally taking shape in blood.
And what a plan. “Restoring credibility” was the internal watchword of the war’s architects (Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle) men with Cold War neuroses and a collective obsession with the American decline they projected onto the wreckage of Beirut, Mogadishu, and Saigon. Fritz excavates the moments where this ideology crystallised into policy: notes from Rumsfeld declaring that U.S. weakness in the face of Saddam’s “aggressiveness” undermined American leverage in Israel–Palestine talks; a memo from Paul Wolfowitz insisting that those in the Middle East only respect force, and that inaction would be seen as surrender. Even the United Nations, Bush would later write, risked losing “credibility” if it failed to support regime change.
This is the dialectic of power in its imperial form. When empire fears decline, it lashes out, not to defend itself, but to restore its image of omnipotence. Credibility, in this schema, isn’t truthfulness; it’s the capacity to dominate. It is the fantasy that America’s moral legitimacy stems from its ability to kill without consequence. In this sense, Iraq was never about Iraq. It was about reaffirming the primacy of the United States after 9/11 made that primacy appear vulnerable. Gaza, today, functions the same way: a demonstration of power’s ability to break all restraints and still command international deference.
But empire never acts alone. One of Deadly Betrayal’s most revealing and potentially explosive arguments is its exploration of the war as a proxy intervention on behalf of Israeli strategic priorities. Fritz details how Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, advised by Newt Gingrich and stacked with neoconservative hawks, pushed for the war as part of a campaign to destroy the state sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel could not be seen to crush Palestinian resistance groups through open ethnic cleansing (at least not then) so the United States would perform the function for them, dismantling Iraq as the first domino. Syria and Iran were next. It’s all in the memos: town hall meetings planned for the post-invasion period with pre-approved “opposition” groups; documents assessing the role of Iraq in financing suicide bombers in Palestine; and policy papers describing the Iraq War as the first stage in a broader restructuring of the Middle East in Israel’s favour.
Fritz is careful, perhaps too careful, in how he frames this argument. He goes out of his way to distinguish criticism of Israel’s influence from antisemitic conspiracy. Yet it is clear that what he is documenting is not a shadowy cabal, but a well-resourced network of ideological actors working through formal institutions: AIPAC, JINSA, the Office of Special Plans. The war was not “for Israel” in the sense of a narrow favour. It was for a certain vision of the region. One in which American power and Israeli supremacy were locked in mutual reinforcement. That vision is now, with Netanyahu’s open-air massacre in Gaza and Trump’s second-term regime, no longer even masked in diplomatic speech.
The war’s paper trail was vast, and deliberately obscured. The redactions that punctuate Deadly Betrayal are not an archival formality. They are part of the story. What’s been blacked out is likely what matters most: internal admissions that WMDs were irrelevant; warnings that “anticipatory self-defence” was legally untenable; and the minutes of meetings where architects like Wolfowitz and Feith outlined a map of the region soaked in pre-emptive force. These deletions aren’t gaps in the narrative. They are the evidence of continuity. Proof that even now, the state is still protecting the lie. The cover-up never ended.
The War on Terror dehumanised its targets through language, “terrorists,” “militants,” “collateral damage.” Gaza takes this logic further. Here, civilians are labelled human shields by default. Children become “terrorist infrastructure.” Hospitals are “command centres.” This is not an anomaly. It is the endpoint of a politics in which the enemy has no rights, the state has no limits, and violence becomes a form of governance.
What of the people who suffered most? This is where Deadly Betrayal is both powerful and incomplete. Fritz’s loyalty remains with the wounded veterans he helped care for at Walter Reed, men and women torn apart by the war’s physical and psychic violence. He writes movingly about their injuries, the bureaucratic indifference they faced, and the obscene cost of war in human lives. Yet the Iraqi people themselves are often absent, or appear only as background to the American experience. This is perhaps understandable for a memoirist steeped in the culture of the U.S. military. But it also marks the limits of the frame. If the war was a betrayal of American troops, it was something even worse for Iraq: an annihilation, a dismemberment of sovereignty and society for the sake of empire’s renewal.
In one of the book’s most damning insights, Fritz reveals that the military’s obsession with planning wasn’t matched by any interest in reconstruction. The neoconservative doctrine rejected “nation-building” even as it destroyed a nation. What mattered was the spectacle of power: the shock, the awe, the humiliation of Saddam broadcast live. The rest (looted museums, Blackwater death squads, sectarian civil war) was left to rot. When it failed, as it inevitably did, the architects wrote their memoirs, built their think tanks, and waited for the next war.
What makes Deadly Betrayal matter is not just what it uncovers, it’s who uncovered it. Fritz didn’t write this as a critic. He wrote it as someone entrusted with empire’s secrets. He served the system until the evidence made that impossible. This is not repentance. It’s exposure. And it shreds every last excuse. You can’t say “we didn’t know.” He did. And he kept the receipts. When insiders speak out, they don’t offer perspective. They remove the mask.
That’s why this book should be read. Because the lie still governs us. Because the architects of Iraq still shape the world. Because Gaza is not a rupture. It is the continuation.
Deadly Betrayal is what someone writes when they’ve had enough of watching the same people lie, and get away with it. The language just changed. “Credibility” became the “rules-based international order.” “Pre-emption” became “deterrence.” But the logic (force without accountability) remains.
The redactions aren’t archival quirks. They are the story. Thick black lines streak across pages of Deadly Betrayal, not because the information is still operationally sensitive, but because it’s damning. These are the parts that would confirm what the war’s architects still deny: that WMDs were never the real issue; that “anticipatory self-defence” had no legal footing; that Iraq was always just the first move in a broader plan for regional domination. These deletions don’t obscure the truth, they mark its outline. They are the state’s fingerprint, proof that the cover-up didn’t end with Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” It simply updated its vocabulary and buried the evidence deeper.
Deadly Betrayal is more than a record of past crimes. It is a reminder that empire never confesses—it redacts. It changes costume, rewrites doctrine, rebrands its violence as “deterrence” or “self-defence,” but the machinery remains. Fritz, by stepping out of the machine and turning its documents against it, offers something rare: not redemption, but exposure. His book is a warning, not in theory, but in fact, because the next war is always seeded in the silence of the last. Today it is Gaza. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else. Unless we stop treating these revelations as historical footnotes and start recognising them as the live, bleeding edge of a system that feeds on forgetting.
Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq by Dennis Fritz is published by OR Books.
