“Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…” Moore, who worked for the U.S. State Department and was stationed in Kirkuk in 2008, found it ironic that though many Iraqis barely spoke English, they had no trouble quoting this well-known line from Kipling. They reasoned that the U.S. government and Iraqis did not think alike. “The Iraqi experience,” as Moore had discovered, was and still “is not easy to learn,” especially since Iraq, this ancient Biblical area also known as the Nahrain, or the Land of Rivers, is replete with a complex history of tribal and neighboring wars. But when the U.S. government came into the scene with its democratic mindset, Moore asks, if the American government had somehow thought as Iraqis from the start, would it have been different in the past, present and future? This is his challenge to readers as he narrates stories that were told to him and are based on real people, places, and events during the Iraq, Iraq-Kuwait, and Iran-Iraq wars.