While teaching strategy techniques at the Air Force Academy, Divide resident Thomas Mowle volunteered to go to Baghdad, Iraq, in August 2004.  

“I was trying to help the coalition understand the political situation in Iraq and how that affected our strategy to be able to win the war,” he said.

Ten years after his Iraqi experience, Mowle recently released a book he has worked on since 2014. Titled “Chaos in the Green Zone; My Time as Iraq War Strategist,” the book is a kind of catharsis for Mowle, who lives in Divide.

“I never really came to terms personally in what I did, what I experienced and what difference did it make,” he said. “I try to tell what it’s like to be in that situation, so it’s a personal story with details, what happened and how it affected me.”

The U.S. began withdrawing from Iraq in 2007 and completed the operation in 2011.

Reflecting on his experience, Mowle talks about how the bias of optimism works against the United States.

“We examined the political situation in Iraq and it became clear that the best thing for us would be the election of a government in January 2005 that is like the one Paul Bremer set up of representatives across Iraq,” Mowle said.

Instead, he added, the election in Iraq divided the Shia, the Kurds and Sunni Arabs.

“Therefore, they were not part of writing the constitution,” he said.

The book springs from Mowle’s look at the role of the U.S. in Iraq.

“As I was looking at a model about what the outcomes could be I became aware that I had a bias toward optimism,” he said. “We certainly disregarded possible bad outcomes and assumed they wouldn’t happen. It took a long time or me to come to an understanding of what it was like.”

In the book, Mowle looks at what the U.S. intended to happen.  In October of that year, with Iraq elections coming up, Mowle said the U.S. was considering announcing a plan to withdraw from Iraq after the elections.

“The story is there and back again, a science fiction kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a history, a memoir and a war story.”

Mowle hosts a launch party for “Chaos in the Green Zone: My Time as an Iraq War Strategist,” from 6 to 8 p.m. April 14 at Ivywild School library as 1604 S. Cascade Ave. in Colorado Springs.