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Fiasco |
| The American Military Adventure in Iraq |
by Thomas E. Ricks
ISBN: 159420103X
Pub. Date: July 2006
ISBN-13: 9781594201035
Format: Hardcover, pp. 496
List Price: $27.95
Sale price: $24.95 |
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Politics |
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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.
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