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Book review: Iraq war as ’Fiasco’ |
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Written by SCOTT LINDLAW, asap
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Thursday, 24 August 2006 |
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 The attentive reader of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” will quickly run out of yellow ink highlighting all the misjudgments and missteps that, according to the book, have characterized the U.S. invasion and occupation.
The book is a haunting catalog of prescient warnings against invading, inaccurate predictions by Bush administration officials and a few generals, and chronic mistakes in battling an unanticipated insurgency.
Thomas E. Ricks could have filled 300 pages simply by compiling lists of examples. That, however, would not have made for the highly readable and disturbing book he has written. “Fiasco” is enlivened by on-the-record, breathtakingly honest critiques from many of the officers and civilian authorities who have actually prosecuted the war. It is further strengthened by the accounts of young soldiers fighting bravely, by Ricks’ own reporting on the ground in Iraq and by a strong sense of historical context.
Ricks, the senior Pentagon reporter for The Washington Post, sometimes delves too deeply into insider military culture and jargon. The reader must come to the book with a deep interest in the armed forces, or Iraq, or both. But the reward for finishing the book is a more literate grasp of the events taking place today.
Ricks doesn’t pull his punches. A book such as this should have a point of view, yet mainstream journalists who write them often shy away from revealing much of their own opinions.
“Fiasco” is as pugnacious and provocative throughout the narrative as its title promises. On page 4, discussing the casus belli for a “pre-emptive war based on false premises,” Ricks declares, “Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story.”
 The core argument of “Fiasco” is that toppling Saddam Hussein and his government was not particularly significant, and that the United States went into Iraq without a plan for the important part: the postwar occupation. “The thought was, you didn’t need it,” says Lt. Gen. Joseph K. Kellogg, a senior member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The assumption was that everything would be fine after the war, that they’d be happy they got rid of Saddam.”
This assumption had a cascading effect of consequences, none of them helpful, Ricks writes. Ricks says the “incomplete” Pentagon blueprint for the invasion was “perhaps the worst war plan in American history.”
“Because the Pentagon assumed that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that an Iraqi government would be stood up quickly, it didn’t plan seriously for less rosy scenarios,” he says. “Because it so underestimated the task at hand, it didn’t send a well-trained, coherent team of professionals, but rather an odd collection of youthful Republican campaign workers and other novices.” There were also far too few troops, which hurt the American effort again and again, he says.
Nor did the Americans adapt quickly enough to the insurgency, even as the insurgency swiftly evolved to confront the Americans. One result was mass sweeps for fighting-age Iraqi men, which dumped thousands into detention facilities such as Abu Ghraib. A prison scandal was born, and hatred among a generation of Iraqis was incubating.
Indeed, Ricks devotes two full chapters to U.S. tactics that seemed to fuel the insurgency. An example: disbanding the Iraqi army, which not only obliterated one of the few unifying institutions in deeply splintered Iraq, it also cut hundreds of thousands of Iraqis off from an income.
 Yet Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials continued issuing their relentlessly upbeat public assessments of the situation in Iraq, he notes.
Ricks traces the “real war in Iraq” -- the beginning of the insurgency -- to August 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian embassy, killing 11 people and wounding more than 50.
The next day, the Coalition Provision Authority, the Bush administration’s governing body in Iraq, “released a public relations document that touted 100 indicators of how well things were going in Iraq,” Ricks writes.
The CPA document said: “Most of Iraq is calm and progress on the road to democracy and freedom not experienced in decades continues.”
Today, more than 2,600 American soldiers have died in Iraq since Bush declared the mission accomplished, and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. Deputy Health Minister Adel Muhsin said about 3,500 Iraqis died violently last month nationwide — the highest monthly tally of the war. The number of roadside bombs directed against U.S. and Iraqi forces also increased sharply last month.
What is driving this violence? Who are the insurgents? Why are they fighting Americans? How many are there? What should the United States be doing? How will we get out?
“Fiasco” doesn’t have the answers, because no one does. Still, the book offers valuable insight into the key people and places shaping a war that is unfolding with no end in sight.
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asap contributor Scott Lindlaw is an AP reporter based in San Francisco, where he covers homeland security. He previously was an AP White House reporter. | Only registered users can write comments.
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