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Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas Ricks



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From Penguin Books, the Publisher, About "Fiasco":

"Many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated.

There are a number of heroes in Fiasco—inspiring leaders from the highest levels of the Army and Marine hierarchies to the men and women whose skill and bravery led to battlefield success in towns from Fallujah to Tall Afar—but again and again, strategic incoherence rendered tactical success meaningless. There was never any question that the U.S. military would topple Saddam Hussein, but as Fiasco shows there was also never any real thought about what would come next. This blindness has ensured the Iraq war a place in history as nothing less than a fiasco. Fair, vivid, and devastating, Fiasco is a book whose tragic verdict feels definitive."

"Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on the unprecedented candor of key participants."

In "Fiasco," Ricks writes: "President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”

As the July 25 New York Times Review exhorts: "The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: 'Fiasco.' That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.

"By virtue of the author’s wealth of sources within the American military and the book’s comprehensive timeline (beginning with the administration’s inflammatory statements about Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, through the invasion and occupation, to the escalating religious and ethnic strife that afflicts the country today), 'Fiasco' is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the United States came to go to war in Iraq, how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency and how these events will affect the future of the American military. Though other books have depicted aspects of the Iraq war in more intimate and harrowing detail, though other books have broken more news about aspects of the war, this volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope."

The New York Times review ends ominously: "The failure to contain the insurgency would have dire consequences as the war dragged on. While the occupation of Iraq (which Mr. Wolfowitz had predicted would basically pay for itself through oil revenue) was costing American taxpayers an estimated $5 billion a month in 2004 and 2005, the chaos-ridden country was replacing Afghanistan as a training ground for a new generation of terrorists. Meanwhile, writes Mr. Ricks, the United States Army found itself in a strategic position that 'painfully resembled that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the early 1980’s.'

"Not only had the war 'stressed the U.S. Army to the breaking point,' a study published by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute declared, but it had also turned out to be 'an unnecessary preventive war of choice” that 'created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland' against further attacks from Al Qaeda. The war 'was not integral' to the global war on terrorism, the report concluded, but was a costly 'detour from it.'"

"Fiasco" is a compelling dispatch from the department of reality, written by a mainstream journalist -- with a long history of war reporting behind him -- who has escaped from fantasy island.

Whatever Bush touches turns into a "Fiasco."

If he were your brother-in-law, you could just ignore him at family gatherings as he did tricks with peanuts and called everyone "Pancho" while snickering at himself.

But he's got too much power to keep allowing him on the loose.

Too many people are dying needlessly, our military is being degraded, and billions of our hard-earned taxpaying dollars are being spent on a disastrous folly.

"Fiasco" says it all, and in a very credible fashion.

© Copyright 2006 BuzzFlash

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[F6 note -- in addition to (items linked in) the post to which this post is a reply and preceding (and other following), see also:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=13201454 (and preceding and following);
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=13181087 ;
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=13171502 ; and
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?Message_id=13143430 ]