James Fallows.
Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq.
New York: Vintage, 2006.

Book information: publisher, Amazon.com.

I would include this collection of essays by Fallows, which originally appeared in The Atlantic, in any short list of recommended books on the 2003 U.S. invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, which list would also include Thomas Ricks's Fiasco and George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. (I have omitted naming some books I haven't read yet.)

Essays in the book:

1. The Fifty-first State?, November 2002


2. Blind Into Baghdad, January/February 2004


3. Bush's Lost Year, October 2004


4. Why Iraq Has No Army, December 2005


5. Will Iran Be Next?, December 2004


6. Afterword

James Fallows:

• James Fallows, Wikipedia.


• James Fallows Index, his articles, etc. at The Atlantic.


• James Fallows, his blog at The Atlantic.


• Interview: James Fallows, "The Invasion of Iraq," PBS Frontline, broadcast date: February or March, 2004.


• James Fallows, Getting out of Iraq: What's the right idea when all ideas are bad?, 30 November 2006.


• Fallows now lives in and reports from China. Some recent essays are:
  China Makes, The World Takes, The Atlantic, July/August 2007
  and
  The $1.4 Trillion Question, The Atlantic, January/February 2008.

Bibliography:

Fallows mentions several books and other publications in the essays included in Blind Into Baghdad, but the book lacks a formal bibliography. The following is a list of most of the items he mentions. The number before each item indicates the page where the reference occurs.

• 33 John Dower. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. W. W. Norton & Co., 2000. First published in 1999.
  (Amazon.com)


• 34 Iraq Index: Tracking Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq. Sabin Center for Middle East Policy, The Brookings Institution.


• 47 U.S. Department of State. The Future of Iraq Project. Archived at The Memory Hole.


• 81 William D. Nordhaus. Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War. The New York Review of Books, Volume 49, Number 19, 05 December 2002.


• 82 Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz. The Economic Costs of The Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of The Conflict [PDF]. Paper prepared for presentation at the ASSA meeting, 2006.
  
  An expanded and updated version of this paper has been published as the book:
  Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. W. W. Norton & Co., March 2008.
  (Amazon.com)


• 86 Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill. Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario. Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania: The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, February 2003.
  
  This report and The Future of Iraq Project document and illustrate the fact that several elements of the U.S. government seriously considered what the U.S. should have done after it invaded Iraq. However, all that work was actively dismissed and ignored by the civilian leadership of the U.S. military (i.e., Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith) and that foolish posture of willful ignorance directed U.S. policy towards Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion.


• 99 David Halberstam. The Best and the Brightest. Ballantine Books, 1993. First published in 1972.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 119 Richard A. Clarke. Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror. Free Press, March 2004.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 120 Bob Woodward. Bush at War. Simon & Schuster, November 2002.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 120 Bob Woodward. Plan of Attack. Simon & Schuster, April 2004.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 140 Jeffrey Record. Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq. US Naval Institute Press, April 2004.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 164 Thomas X. Hammes. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. Zenith Press, September 2004.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 173 David Galula. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Praeger Security International / Greenwood Publishing Group, August 2006.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 174 John A. Nagl. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. University of Chicago Press, 2005. First published by Praeger Publishers in 2002.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 175 Robert A. Pape. Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, May 2005.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)


• 225 Nigel Aylwin-Foster. Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations. Military Review, November-December, 2005.


• 226 H. R. McMaster. Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. Harper Perennial, 1998. First published in 1997.
  (Google Book Search, Amazon.com)

Chalmers Johnson.
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Book information: The American Empire Project, Google Books, Amazon.com.

I recommend viewing the Conversations with History episodes in which Johnson discusses his books. See the links in the Online Video section below.

Chalmers Johnson:

• Chalmers Johnson, Wikipedia.


• Japan Policy Research Institute, Chalmers Johnson, President.


• TomDispatch.com Interview with Chalmers Johnson, March 2006:
  Part 1, Our Military Empire,
  Part 2, Our Fading Republic.


• Chalmers Johnson, Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States, Harper's Magazine, January 2007.


• Chalmers Johnson, Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door, TomDispatch.com, 30 January 2007.
  (An excerpt from the book Nemesis.)


• Interview, AlterNet.org, March 2007.


• Chalmers Johnson, America's Empire of Bases, TomDispatch.com, 15 January 2004.


• Chalmers Johnson essays at TomDispatch.com


• Chalmers Johnson, The Continuation of the Cold War and the Advent of American Militarism, Japan Policy Research Institute, Occasional Paper, No. 25 (April 2002).


• Chalmers Johnson, No Longer the "Lone" Superpower: Coming to Terms with China, Japan Policy Research Institute, JPRI Working Paper No. 105 (March 2005).


• Chalmers Johnson, The Life and Times of the CIA, The American Empire Project, 25 July 2007.
  A review of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner.


• Articles by Chalmers Johnson.
  A collection of links.

Online Video:

• The Last Days of the American Republic: A Conversation with Chalmers Johnson, Conversations with History, 07 March 2007.
  Interview related to the publication of Nemesis. A very good introduction to the book.


• Militarism and the American Empire: A Conversation with Chalmers Johnson, Conversations with History, 10 May 2004.
  Interview related to the publication of The Sorrows of Empire.


• Chalmers Johnson interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, 27 February 2007, transcript, MP3 link.

Miscellaneous Reviews, Essays, etc:

• Jonathan Freedland, Bush's Amazing Achievement, The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 10, 15 June 2007.
  "One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve."


• Michael Ignatieff, The Burden, The New York Times Magazine, 05 January 2003.
  A copy of the essay is also available at http://empirelite.ca/ as "Empire Lite."
  A comment on Ignatieff's essay which elegantly reveals Ignatieff's blindness.
  In this essay Ignatieff writes as an explicit advocate of American imperialism, a position he has since renounced. Useful in attempting to understand how and why the U.S. establishment (beyond the Neoconservatives) supported the conquest and occupation of Iraq.


• Howard Zinn, Empire or Humanity?: What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire, TomDispatch.com, 01 April 2008.