We have two projects running at TPMCafe this week, both focused on Iraq.

First we'll be running a discussion between TPM's own Josh Marshall and Alex Holmes, a co-writer of House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries documenting the rise and fall of the Iraqi dictator. Produced in partnership with HBO and BBC, the drama aired in Britain this summer, and will air on HBO starting December 7. We'll be posting a few clips from the film throughout the week, so stay tuned.

At our Book Club, Michael Lind joins us for a discussion of his 2006 book, The American Way of Strategy. Lind, once the darling of conservative circles, now bills himself as a member of the "Radical Center" and serves as a senior fellow at the New America foundation. In the book he asks:

Is it all propaganda, then? Is the statement that American soldiers died in foreign wars defending the liberties of Americans nothing more than a patriotic lie? The thesis of this book is that the assertion is true ... The purpose of the American way of strategy has always been to defend the American way of life.

Other Book Club participants this week include: David Rieff, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research; David Shorr, the program officer in Policy Analysis and Dialogue at the Stanley Foundation, and coeditor of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide; Michael Signer, the Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and author, Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies; Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow and Director of Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Join us.