Thomas E. Ricks, "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq"

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is a 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.

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But 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.

Amazon.com Review
Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part—the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003—is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate—and then failed to recognize—the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources—most of them on record—who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought.

From Publishers Weekly
The main points of this hard-hitting indictment of the Iraq war have been made before, but seldom with such compelling specificity. In dovetailing critiques of the civilian and military leadership, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Ricks (Making the Corps) contends that, under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, the Pentagon concocted "the worst war plan in American history," with insufficient troops and no thought for the invasion's aftermath. Thus, an under-manned, unprepared U.S. military stood by as chaos and insurgency took root, then responded with heavy-handed tactics that brutalized and alienated Iraqis. Based on extensive interviews with American soldiers and officers as well as first-hand reportage, Ricks's detailed, unsparing account of the occupation paints a woeful panorama of reckless firepower, mass arrests, humiliating home invasions, hostage-taking and abuse of detainees. It holds individual commanders to account, from top generals Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchez on down. The author's conviction that a proper hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency strategy might have salvaged the debacle is perhaps naive, and pays too little heed to the intractable ethnic conflicts underlying what is by now a full-blown civil war. Still, Ricks's solid reporting, deep knowledge of the American military and willingness to name names make this perhaps the most complete, incisive analysis yet of the Iraq quagmire.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Thomas E. Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize winning senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and for 17 years a Wall Street Journal reporter, uses unprecedented access to senior military personnel and his impressive experience in military reporting in most of the world's hot spots to examine the United States' efforts in Iraq. Ironically, the depth of the research is one of the few aspects of the book with which critics take issue, since it might distract the layperson from the thread of the author's argument. Still, Fiasco might be the most important book to date in helping us to understand the intricacies of the war and the landscape of the post-9/11 world. Ricks's previous books include Making the Corps (1997), which follows a Marine Corps training platoon through basics, and A Soldier's Duty (2001), a novel.

Contents

Cast of Characters
The Bush Administration (2002–4)
At the Pentagon
U.S. Central Command (2003–4)
In Iraq (2003–4)
Coalition Provisional Authority
Military
Other
In Iraq (2004 And Later)
Civilian
Military
Others appearing frequently
Photos

Part I – Containment
1 A Bad Ending
2 Containment and Its Discontents
3 This Changes Everything: The Aftermath of 9/11
4 The War of Words
5 The Run-Up
6 The Silence of the Lambs

Part II – Into Iraq
7 Winning a Battle
8 How to Create an Insurgency (I)
9 How to Create an Insurgency (II)
10 The CPA: "Can't Produce Anything"
11 Getting Tough
12 The Descent Into Abuse

Part III – The Long Term
13 "The Army of the Euphrates" Takes Stock
14 The Marine Corps Files a Dissent
15 The Surprise
16 The Price Paid
17 The Corrections
18 Turnover
19 Too Little, Too Late?

Afterword: Betting Against History
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

Tags: WorldPolitics, MiddleEast, Iraq

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