Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq Thomas E. Ricks Date: 2006-07-25   —   Book product page Rating:

This book is absolutely the definitive politico-military history of President Bush's Iraq adventure. Ricks went through tens of thousands of government documents and interviewed every significant serving and retired  military officer, as well as State and Defense Department officials to tell the story in the most accurate and unbiased manner.

That's not to say the book isn't critical of the Bush administration and senior officers directing the war from the Pentagon; it is. Highly critical. But the criticism is all well documented and based on personal interviews with the generals and civilian officials on the ground in Iraq.

Ricks doesn't tell us anything new by showing how the Bush administration and Congress utterly failed to do their homework on Iraq and plan for the occupation and reconstruction, but he does have an interesting tale to tell about the state of denial in which senior officers thought about the mission, leaving the generals and troops on the ground pursuing counterproductive strategies and generally winning the battles but losing the war.

According to the military officers serving in Iraq, the administration and the Pentagon were glacially slow to admit that an insurgency existed, and when it couldn't be denied any longer, still refused to refocus from conventional tactics based on massive firepower to counterinsurgency tactics.

Fighting a counterinsurgency is nothing new. The French and the US did it (poorly) in Vietnam and the British did it (successfully) in Malaya. This form of warfare is well understood, and only the reluctance of the Bush administration to admit that an insurgency existed and the disdain in which the highest ranking military officers hold counterinsurgency warfare kept us from fighting it effectively from the start.

The military now talks the talk on counterinsurgency tactics, but has yet to fully formulate and implement all the training, logistics and deployments necessary to actually use the tactics. Ricks believes (as do I) that it's still possible to avert complete disaster in Iraq, but it's not going to happen with the current mix of troops and the complete lack of a strong political component to the campaign. That's why I'm voting Democrat.

Republicans see the Iraq mission as an anti-insurgency campaign, Democrats talk about it as a counter-insurgency campaign. The Republican vision is unwinnable because killing Iraqi insurgents and innocent bystanders just creates more insurgents. By contrast, Democrats seem to intuitively understand that Iraq will be won or lost primarily in the political and diplomatic arena: The Iraqi people are not the enemy; they are the prize.

As I said, "Fiasco" is the definitive book on the Iraq War. If you don't read it, then you don't know what you're talking about.

tags: iraq  fiasco  thomas ricks