Product Description

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 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163675 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

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. --Tom Nissley

Making a Fiasco

Thomas Ricks spent five tours in Iraq during the war, reporting for the Washington Post and researching and writing Fiasco. Like many of the officers he most admires, when he wanted to understand what was happening as American troops encountered stronger and longer-lived resistance to the occupation than expected, he turned to recent and classic accounts of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines through the lessons of Vietnam, and he reports on his favorites for us in his list of the 10 books for understanding Iraq that aren't about Iraq. You can also get a glimpse into his writing process with a much different list he has prepared for us: the music he listened to while writing and researching the book, from Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell to Ryan Adams and Josh Ritter. And he took the time to answer a few questions about Fiasco:

Amazon.com: As military correspondent for the Post, you have made five trips to Iraq over the last four years. How has it changed over that time?

Thomas E. Ricks: It has been markedly worse each time, in terms of security. On my first trip, in April-May 2003, we would walk out on the streets of Baghdad at night, albeit with caution. Even on my second trip, in the summer of 2003, I would feel comfortable hopping in a car and driving 100 miles north from Baghdad to Tikrit. To do either of those things now would be suicidal. In January and February of this year, Baghdad felt worse to me Mogadishu did when I was there in 1993 or Sarajevo did when I was there a few years later. It appeared to me that there was no security, except what you provided for yourself with armed men and careful planning. One Army major described the city to me as being in "the pure Hobbesian state" in which everybody is fighting everybody.

By the way, contrary to what I see asserted occasionally, most reporters don't live in the Green Zone, the walled-off area in central Baghdad that is the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Reporters live out in the city, and I think generally have a better feel for what is going on than do people living in the Zone or on big American military bases. In the area of Baghdad I stayed in, I constantly heard gunfire and explosions. Yet an American colonel told me that my neighborhood was deemed "secure." I think that really meant that U.S. troops could drive through it while heavily armed--say, with a .50 caliber machine gun atop a Humvee--and usually not be attacked.

I worry that what the Americans measure are threats to U.S. troops and the killings of Iraqis. That neglects a huge spectrum of other significant activities--rapes, robberies, kidnappings, acts of extortion, and, most importantly, acts of violent intimidation.

Amazon.com: You cite many strategic errors in the planning and execution of the war, but perhaps the central one is that the U.S. military leadership failed to recognize that they were fighting an insurgency, and their methods of fighting in fact helped to create that insurgency. Can you explain those methods, and their effects?

Ricks: The U.S. military that went into Iraq in 2003 was the best military in the world for fighting another military. But it was woefully unprepared for the task at hand. For example, U.S. military culture believes in bringing overwhelming force to bear. Yet classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for using only the minimal amount of force necessary to get the job done. U.S. soldiers and their commanders, untrained and unschooled in the difficult art of counterinsurgency, tended to improvise. So in the summer of 2003, some soldiers in Baghdad decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry--and they sometimes did this by threatening to shoot the children of looters, and even conducting mock executions.

More broadly, the Army in the fall of 2003 fell back on what it knew how to do, which was conduct large-scale "cordon-and-sweep" operations. These missions scarfed up thousands of Iraqis, most of them fence-sitting neutrals, and detained them. U.S. military intelligence officials later concluded that 85% of those detained were of no intelligence value. The detention experience frequently was humiliating for Iraqis, a violation of another key counterinsurgency principle: Treat your prisoners well. (Your readers who want to know more about this should read a terrific little book by David Galula titled Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.)

Not every unit was ineffective or counterproductive. I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year.

Amazon.com: But today's military leadership was formed in Vietnam, when all of those lessons of counterinsurgency were supposedly learned before. Why didn't that experience translate into a preparation for the current conflict?

Ricks: Military experts, such at Andrew Krepinevich (The Army and Vietnam) and Lt. Col. John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) say that after that war ended, the Army washed its hands of the entire experience and essentially concluded that it was never going to do anything like that again. It was almost as if the very word "counterinsurgency" was banned from official Army discourse.

In Iraq, there was a tiny minority of American soldiers early on who understood how to win the occupation. These generally were civil affairs officers and other Special Forces types. But their wisdom often was disregarded. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war being fought conventionally," one Special Forces lieutenant colonel glumly commented one day in Baghdad.

Amazon.com: You've been writing about the military for the Post and the Wall Street Journal for years now, and Fiasco is built from the testimony of a remarkable array of sources up and down the chain of command, some off the record but many more on the record. Can you talk about your sources? Is this level of public criticism of a war from within the military precedented??

Ricks: Yeah, reporting the book was a pretty emotional experience. Even having covered this war as it unfolded, I was taken aback by the rage that some officers felt toward the Bush Administration, and especially toward Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And also toward Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the no. 2 guy at the Pentagon. I think the rage is probably like what the military felt about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. What is unprecedented, I think, is that many officers had doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, especially in the way we did it.

The emotions also hit me pretty hard at times, especially when I was writing my chapter 13, about how widespread abuse was by American soldiers in 2003-04, often because they hadn't been trained for the mission they faced. I have spent more than 15 years covering the military. I tend to like and admire these people. So when I learned about a 4th Infantry Division soldier shooting an unarmed, handcuffed Iraqi detainee in the stomach, and the investigating MPs saying the soldier should be charged with homicide, and instead the commander simply discharged the soldier from the Army--well, that bothered me.

Another thing that struck me with sources was the mountain of information that was available. I read over 30,000 pages of documents for this book. At the end of one interview a guy gave me a CD-ROM with every e-mail he had sent to Ambassador Bremer, who ran the civilian end of the first year of the occupation. Other people showed me diaries, unit logs, official briefings, and such. Also the ACLU did a great job of obtaining and releasing piles of official U.S. military documents related to abuse--so I could see the time stamp on an e-mail in which an intelligence officer stated that "the gloves are coming off" in interrogations, and one soldier recommended blows to the chest while another wrote back recommending low-level electrocution.

Unfortunately the Army wouldn't release the details of citations for valorous acts by soldiers, which means that the Pentagon made it easier for me to learn about the sins of soldiers than about their acts of bravery. The Marine Corps did give me those "narratives" that support the bestowing of medals, which I really appreciated. Those documents really brought home to me the fierceness of the two Battles of Fallujah, in April and November 2004--probably the toughest fighting American troops have seen since Hue and Khe Sanh in the Vietnam War.

Amazon.com: In the last section of the book, you project a variety of possible scenarios for the next 10 years in the Middle East, mostly grim ones, and just in the past two weeks the sudden violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is leading to talk of a wider regional conflict. Where do you think those events are leading us?

Ricks: We are really in unexplored territory. We are carrying out the first-ever U.S. occupation of an Arab nation. This is also almost the first time we have engaged in sustained combat ground war with an all-volunteer force. (I think the suppression of the Philippines insurrection might count as a small precedent.)

Even more significantly, I think the Bush Administration doesn't really like "stability" in the Middle East. In its view, "stability" has been the goal of previous administrations, but pursuing it led to 9/11. It is not the goal, it is the target. So they are for rolling the dice, both in Iraq and in Lebanon. I think the big worry is those wars spilling over borders. Fasten your seat belts.

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. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Hubris, the ancient Greeks taught, is followed by Nemesis; overbearing presumption always finds the goddess of divine retribution and vengeance baying at its heels. Washington is learning that painful lesson again today -- and Iraqi civilians and American troops are paying the price for the pride that drove the United States to try to implant democracy on the cheap in the heart of the Arab world.

So who's to blame? It is fast becoming established wisdom that it was the Pentagon's political leaders -- especially Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his neoconservative first-term deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and the cocksure chief of their policy shop, Douglas J. Feith -- who, above all, led us down the road to disaster in Iraq. But it's too neat to pin the culpability on the Defense Department's pinstripe-wearing civilian leaders and ignore the blunders of the uniformed top brass or, for that matter, the rest of the U.S. government; as they did in Vietnam, the nation's military and civilian leaderships share the responsibility for what's gone wrong. In his compelling and well-researched book, Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, painfully but clearly reveals an important truth about the Iraq debacle: It has a thousand fathers.

As the title implies, Fiasco pulls no punches. Sure enough, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith come off badly in Ricks's account. But so do most Democratic members of Congress (whom Ricks labels not doves but "lambs" for their failure to oversee the executive branch) and the media, particularly the New York Times, which failed miserably to probe the Bush administration's war justifications and postwar planning. Ricks is also particularly scathing toward L. Paul Bremer, who led the civilian occupation authority in Iraq in 2003-04. Ricks quotes one colonel who described the efforts of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

Troubling as these failures are, they are by now reasonably familiar; what's far less well-known is the bungling of the senior military leadership. With devastating detail, Ricks documents how U.S. generals misunderstood the problems they faced in Iraq and shows how poorly prepared the Army was for the unanticipated danger of a postwar Sunni rebellion. For ignoring the risks of an insurgency after Saddam Hussein's fall, Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, "flunks strategy," Ricks writes; the war's commanding general designed "perhaps the worst war plan in American history." Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, and his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace (who's since been promoted to take Myers's old job), come off as smiling yes-men who went along with amateurish impulses from the Bush administration's political leadership and who forsook their duty to offer detached, professional judgments, acting instead as administration flacks in both private and public.

As a result of the lapses of the top brass and the haughtiness of Rumsfeld's men, the U.S. military came into Iraq inadequately prepared -- and hard-pressed to adapt. From the start, it failed to recognize that ensuring public order was the key to postwar success. As one general puts it, "I was on a street corner in Baghdad, smoking a cigar, watching some guys carry a sofa by -- and it never occurred to me that I was going to be the guy to go get that sofa back."

As the insurgency deepened, the Pentagon's military and civilian leaders first ignored it, then worsened it by using wrongheaded tactics. By emphasizing killing the enemy rather than winning over the people, the U.S. military made new enemies more quickly than it eliminated existing foes. Mass arrests and other attempts to intimidate Iraqis backfired, swelling the insurgents' ranks. U.S. units and troops deployed to Iraq turned over quickly, shuttling in and out of the country with little attempt to build a coherent intelligence picture of the situation on the ground or to sustain hard-won relationships with the local Iraqi officials trying to make their country work. Cities such as Mosul and Fallujah were liberated from insurgents and then abandoned; inevitably, the insurgents took over again. Such mistakes are depressing but not entirely surprising: The U.S. military has forgotten many of the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare that it learned bitterly in Vietnam and elsewhere. Having neglected counterinsurgency in the military's training and education programs, we should not be shocked that we are ill-equipped to wage it.

Indeed, the picture Ricks paints is so damning that it is, at times, too charitable to say that the military and civilian leadership failed. Fiasco portrays several commanders as misguided but trying their best, but others -- particularly the hapless Franks -- appear not to have tried at all. Worse, the overall war and occupation effort lacked the high-level White House coordination essential to victory, allowing Bremer to operate on his own, making major decisions without consulting the Pentagon or the National Security Council, let alone his counterparts on the military side of the occupation.

These failures feel particularly raw given the sacrifices, grit and determination of the heroes of Ricks's book: the junior and noncommissioned officers risking their lives in Iraq's streets, as well as the few innovative senior officers, such as Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who have shrewdly tried (as the New Yorker's George Packer has put it) to win "over the civilian population by encouraging economic reconstruction and local government." Whether getting supply convoys past insurgent strongholds, identifying ways to defeat the rebels' dreaded IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or deciding whether to cow or charm local leaders, creative officers often invented new tactics and strategy on the spot. When they succeeded, they frequently did so in spite of their leaders. Interviews with such gallant soldiers, as well as their e-mails, blogs and private reports, form the core of Ricks's reporting.

And that reporting is impressive indeed. News on Iraq usually comes in blaring headlines, with little sense of trends and context, but Ricks's work allows us to fit seemingly disparate events into an overall pattern. Take the moral and political catastrophe of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib; Ricks shows the cruelty as not only a failure of command and discipline by the overmatched unit running the prison but also the result of obtuse higher-level decisions about how to fight the insurgents. Several army units, he reports, indiscriminately arrested Iraqis, making no attempt to separate the few who might know something about the insurgents from the many who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The detention system as a whole was chronically understaffed and overwhelmed by the thousands of detainees pouring in, Ricks writes. That did not make the depravity of Abu Ghraib inevitable, but it did make accidents far more likely to happen.

Ambitious as it is, Fiasco does not offer a comprehensive picture of Bremer's occupation authority or the shadowy insurgency itself. It concentrates on the first year of the occupation, often addressing the subsequent two years of struggle largely as a contrast to the occupation's early days. Beyond this narrow focus, Ricks's penetrating book has perhaps only one other weakness: He is too optimistic about how much the Army has done to embrace a Petraeus-style, hearts-and-minds-based counterinsurgency doctrine today. Ricks is right to note positive U.S. moves such as revamping training programs and changing leadership, but the Army is still too focused on winning battles against individual insurgents and not focused enough on providing security for the Iraqi people as a whole, which is the key to undermining the insurgents.

But these limits do not detract from the value of this powerful book. Ricks begins Fiasco with the ancient strategist Sun Tzu's admonition about how to achieve victory: "Know your enemies, know yourself." Clearly, those who took us to war in 2003 knew neither. The question today is whether they can learn.

Reviewed by Daniel Byman
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not Perfect But Easily the Best Book on Iraq Produced So Far
I've spent the better part of the past 36 hours inhaling Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco" and I have to say it is easily the best book so far produced on the Iraq War. I say this as someone who supported the original rationale for going into Iraq and who still supports the war effort. But support should never be blind and I think there's much that opponents and supporters of the war can gain from reading Mr. Ricks' "near-term history" of the conflict. He has produced a remarkable book that synthesizes a broad range of information and yet does so in an immensely readable fashion. The author is to be genuinely congratulated. For me, the book was particularly insightful in offering a cogent narrative of how the insurgency came to be. It presented a detailed inventory of the political and military mistakes of the period stretching from immediately after Baghdad's fall in the late spring of 2003, through the rise of the insurgency later that year and into the middle of 2004.

Is the book perfect? No and doubtless as more time passes and as more information becomes available some of the conclusions and narratives presented here may change. But for the time being, the book is the best contemporary record of the events of the past three years in Iraq and I can't imagine it being surpassed anytime soon. I found it far more useful than the somewhat tepid "Cobra II" and the better-but-not-as-good "Assassin's Gate."

What most impressed me was the way Ricks dealt honestly with the shortcoming of the US military and particularly the US Army. I have the deepest respect and admiration for those who serve, but there has been a tendency to only blame the mistakes in Iraq on the civilian political leadership (who certainly deserve their share of the blame) and to forego honest criticism of the tactics and actions of the troops in the field. Ricks does an excellent job of calling into question the wisdom and preparedness of "Big Army" to fight the type of conflict this country has been engaged in in Iraq for the past three years.

As with any substantive work on an issue as politically-charged as Iraq, there will be discussion of the question of bias and motive on the part of the author. Ricks frankly writes with barely veiled contempt for the president and the secretary of defense, though Paul Bremer, General Ricardo Sanchez, and former Chairman of the Joint Staff Dick Myers come off as even bigger villains (if that's possible.) In many cases, I don't think the blame -- particularly as it relates to Bremer -- is misplaced. More to the point, Ricks' assessment of the mistakes made on the ground in Iraq are sufficiently worthwhile and thought-provoking that his "bashing" of certain officials can be tolerated. To be clear, it's not so much that I mind him assigning blame, it's more that he seems to view the handling of the Iraq war -- ironically enough -- in black-and-white terms with respect to senior political and military figures. In short, Ricks has heroes and then he has those who can do nothing right and, to my mind, this is most apparent in his treatment of Rumsfeld.

To cite just one example, early in the book he questions Rumsfeld's decision to bring in Pete Schoomaker, a retired general to replace outgoing Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki; Ricks notes that Schoomaker, in addition to being retired, is a Special Forces general who is removed from mainstream "Big Army" culture. Ricks seems to imply his appointment is a mistake. Yet by the end of the book, Ricks is trumpeting the fact that the Army in Iraq really needs to fight more like Special Operators and less like a conventional force. Wouldn't it therefore seem like a good idea to have Schoomaker at the top pushing for that type of change?

Similarly, there seems to be a basic conflict at times between whether Ricks thinks more troops are needed or not. He mentions (usually in passing) instances where commanders wanted more forces in specific instances, though he never does provide solid evidence of why their requests were denied or by whom, one of the major disappointments I have with the book. However, even as he suggests that more forces would help he also strongly highlights the damage done by large US presence deployments. This seems to be a disconnect -- and one that Ricks is not alone in making -- in criticism of the US strategy in Iraq. Is the problem that we have too many guys stomping around inadvertently making enemies or is that we don't have enough troops over there?

I bring these points up not only because they seem logically inconsistent but because Ricks "do-no-right" attitude towards the administration seems forced at times, almost like he needs to pile on to placate the many readers who doubtlessly will pick up this book hoping to have more ammo to slam Republicans in Internet chat rooms. Did Rumsfeld really do *nothing* right in the past six and a half years? (Don't feel the need to answer that.) My point here is that an attempt to appear even slightly balanced in presenting the viewpoints of the administration would have been nice, as would a different title, which seems primarily designed to capitalize on the polarization surrounding the war. Mr. Ricks has crafted a thoughtful book that deserved a more inviting title, not least because by the end of it, you're left wondering if we really have turned the corner in Iraq and are on the verge of a breakthrough or if it is really "too little, too late" as one Army reservist observes.

Two other quibbles:

I don't personally know Walt Slocombe, but I always thought he seemed a remarkably intelligent man and, moreover, seemed to be of good character. (Slocombe held the job of under secretary of defense for policy under Clinton, the job that the much maligned Doug Feith held under Dubya's first term.) I was always struck by the fact that Slocombe -- who apparently was moved by patriotism to work with the CPA -- defended Rumsfeld's version of the dismantlement of the Iraqi army, i.e., that it dismantled itself through desertions and that trying to maintain it as the force that was in place when Saddam fell would entail essentially a forced re-conscription of thousands of Iraqis who viewed the military as an instrument of oppression. Better to start from scratch, which we did, but which many critics claim freed up a large number of young Iraqi males with military training to fuel the insurgency. Slocombe's view on the subject -- presumably somewhat informed and coming from the perspective of a Democrat and former senior Clinton official -- is dismissed with one line to the effect of "others saw it differently." Pages and pages then go on about the terrible impacts on Iraq of the decision to disband the army. I have long wanted to see Slocombe's position on this explored beyond his own op-ed on the subject and I was surprised that Ricks gave such little emphasis to his view (or at least didn't explore it further.)

Finally, Ricks, like many others, repeats the notion that "containment was working" on Saddam. Not unlike the arguments proffered to justify the war by the administration, the statement that "containment was working" is only a half-truth. It may have held in check the threat Saddam posed to the region and it also now appears to have sufficiently degraded his ability to pursue WMD. But Ricks overlooks the impact of the containment policy on the broader US position in the Middle East and the detrimental impact that sanctions had on the Iraqi people. Clearly, the presence of US forces on Saudi territory (as part of containment) were a major source of ire for Osama bin Laden and in fact were the primary justification in his declaration of jihad against the United States in 1996. There also was the moral question of whether it was "worth it" in humanitarian terms to keep sanctions in place, as Madame Albright was asked once. Amidst the chaos and death of the Iraq War, it's easy to forget that sanctions, according to the World Health Organization and UNESCO, were driving Iraqi infant mortality rates sky high. Ricks glosses over this perspective in less than half a page extrapolating Paul Wolfowitz's pre-war views, but then later repeats the mantra that "containment was working" as he indicts US failures in Iraq towards the end of the book. We should be clear-eyed about the human costs of the current war, but we also should acknowledge the human costs of the course we were on if we hadn't invaded.

Those criticisms aside, I still cannot recommend this book strongly enough to anyone interested in what's happened in Iraq in the past three and a half years and where we may be headed. It is readable, insightful, and informative. You (as I) may not agree with everything the book has to say, but this book has more to say about Iraq than any work yet produced. Read it for yourself and reach your own conclusions.

sobering account of a colossal failure in leadership
I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this book passed along by a friend. It truly is a page-turner, and I spent most of last night reading it. Ricks has well documented with intricate and compelling detail the complete failure of leadership which resulted in the Iraq fiasco. While many of the facts he's reporting have been detailed before, Ricks's analysis of the many failures in Iraq is far more focused than any other analyses I've read to date.

I found it particularly compelling how Ricks thoroughly documents the dichotomy of the Bush Administration's schizophrenic thinking on Iraq: the rationale for going to war was based on a worst-case scenario, but all the actual war planning itself was based on a best-case scenario. Hence, the colossal management failure which resulted. The report by the Coalition Provisional Authority that Ricks cites says it all about the Iraq occupation: "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."

In closing, I would caution readers here to consider the reviewers who actually seemed to have read the book, as opposed to those with an ideological ax to grind who toss off one-sentence reviews on the day the book is released. Ask someone who has actually read this book for their opinion.

'Fiasco' - And It's Only Gotten Worse
Thomas Ricks has been the senior Pentagon reporter for the Wall Street Journal and later the Washington Post. He is no enemy of the US military (in fact, he does not advocate US withdrawal). This book really should be read by every American not just for what it tells us about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war, but as a cautionary tale about the limits of military power.

Let me be clear: I opposed this war before President Bush chose to start it mainly because it was a distraction from fighting terrorism. `Fiasco' details the choices made by the Administration, the willful ignorance of facts that didn't fit their chosen path.

Fiasco is strongest in describing the false premises upon which the Administration built its case for war, the lack of planning for Phase IV (post-war plans), and Bremer's enormous false steps. And Ricks' admiration for the US military shines through as he relates its failures, successes, and `lessons learned'. There is indeed much to be admired in the US military - such as the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned where the whole point is to review what the Army did, what it did right, what it did wrong, and how to apply those lessons in the future. Sounds like something the White House should try.

Fiasco is such an important book that I would like to give it a `5' star rating and it really should be read, but the book lacks structure, other than simple chronology and after a while begins to read like a string of newspaper articles. The concluding Afterword was especially weak with brief descriptions of what might lie ahead. Ricks is best at description, okay at prescription, and poor at prediction. Fortunately, most of the book is descriptive and very little is predictive.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the story of the Iraq War.