Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

by Thomas E. Ricks - Hardcover - 482 Pages

Previous books on the Iraq war have concluded in the summer ot 2003, not long after the spring invasion, code-named Cobra II. And certainly understanding the crippling strategic mistakes inherent in the buildup And execution of this first phase of combat in Iraq is essential, and Fiasco has much new to contribute to our understanding of the failures of both the civilian ind military leadership to take even a minimally adequate long view. But the heart of the story Fiasco has to tell, which has never been told before, is that ot a military occupation whose leaders failed to see a blooming insurgency for what it was and as a result led
their soldiers in such a way that the insurgency became inevitable. It America's top military commanders had set out to create an Iraqi insurgency, they could hardly have done a better job, not least by countenancing the random arrest and imprisonment of wide swaths of Iraqi men in the most humiliating of conditions. One of this book's many revelations is that "Abu Ghraib" is 3. misnomer because it suggests an isolated institution, when in fact a much larger network of prisons, run bv poorly trained soldiers who frequently committed appalling abuses, deeply antagonized Iraqi society and drove men en masse into the insurgency.

There are a number of American heroes in Fiasco, from wise commanders like generals Petraeus and Mattis and Col. McMaster, who didn't need to be told to implement classic counterinsurgency strategies, to the many heroic men and women on the ground who sweated and bled to do the best they could after not being prepared to fight the war they encountered. In the course of chronicling the war to mid-ioo6. Fiasco contains gripping accounts ot battles such as 2nd Fallujah and Tall Afar, whose names should take their place alongside Iwo Jima and Porkchop Hill on a select list of honor. But effective tactics when harnessed to bad strategy equals military disaster, and in the end Fiasco's judgment that some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders were derelict in their duty proves inescapable. Too many American and Iraqi lives have been lost, and too much of America's might and influence has been squandered, for these individuals to escape a fair reckoning. Fiasco is that reckoning.