FIASCO The American Military Adventure in Iraq Thomas E. Ricks New York: Penguin, July 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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ISBN-13 978-0-1430-3891-7 | ||||
ISBN-10 0-1430-3891-5 | 482pp. | SC/BWI | $16.00 |
From the notorious Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, north to Tikrit and Mosul, or west to the isolated village of Ar Rutbah, this book provides a month by month (sometimes week by week) chronicle of the debacle that our military adventure in Iraq turned into through lack of planning and neglect of corrective measures. These and other trouble spots are shown on two maps at the front of the book.
Thomas Ricks has been a Pentagon correspondent since 1982, first for the Wall Street Journal, moving to the Washington Post in 2000. He was twice part of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning team of reporters. His two previous books, Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty, are well-regarded. In this 2006 book, he reveals in exhaustive detail the discussion and planning (or lack of same) behind the war in Iraq and the largely incompetent conduct of that war.
The U.S. military occupation of Iraq seems almost to have been designed for failure.1 The deliberate lack of planning for Phase IV (post-conquest operations) Ricks shows us was bad enough. It was compounded by mistakes made throughout the conduct of the war. These included:
The first battle of Fallujah exposed all the confusions endemic to the war. Ricks covers it well on pages 330-346. The executive summary: The city was restive, Marine commanders noted as they relieved the Army's 82 Airborne on 24 March 2004. The Army, meanwhile, thought things were fine there — until four Blackwater contractors drove in and were murdered by insurgents who awaited them, then displayed in grisly fashion for the cameras. The televised atrocity evoked horror and a thirst for revenge in Washington.
The Marines, under Gen. Mattis, began a slow, surgical operation to identify and capture the insurgents. But the Blackwater situation drove the White House to order a massive attack. This proceeded to the verge of success until someone — Ricks does not know who — called it off. The result was that Fallujah became an insurgent stronghold, while JCS Chair Myers publicly boasted about the fig-leaf "Fallujah Brigade" and the administration continued to maintain that it was a good outcome.
"Operation Vigilant Resolve" had neither vigilance nor resolve.
Compounding these errors were the hostility and poor cooperation between military commanders and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) run by L. Paul Bremer. Although Ricks keeps his principal focus on the military's activities, he gives us enough insight into the CPA to show Bremer's incompetence as its head.2 In addition, he recounts how the administration held on to Ahmed Chalabi3 far past the point where he was clearly a liability, and how the "coalition of the willing" was largely a sham compared to the one put together for Desert Storm.
Ricks had remarkable access to the officer corps running the war, both Army and Marines.4 He also did painstakingly thorough research into the available documentation. (A number of relevant documents remain classified.) The result is an account of what the military leadership did wrong (and right) in Iraq that is hard to equal. The text contains very few errors, and is supplemented by 31 annotated photographs. Extensive endnotes and a thorough index are provided. I recommend the book to anyone wishing to understand our position in the Middle East. For those building a personal library on the subject, it is a vital addition.