Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq [Hardcover]

This brisk account of the Iraq War (up to early 2006) is not the sensationalist anti-war tract that its title might suggest. Ricks (in line with his job as Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post) concentrates principally on the way that the US instruments of invasion (specifically the Army, the Marines and the civil authority, the CPA) ended up - through a mixture of incompetence, ignorance and sheer hubris - creating and then perpetuating a ferocious insurgency. The account is careful, precise and involves a good deal of repetition and accrual of evidence.

Due its anecdotal approach, Fiasco is a fairly effortless read. Moreover, there are points at which Ricks breaks from his generally prosecutorial approach to discuss dissenting voices, or the reasons given by his broad cast of characters for their success or failure. Nevertheless, one sometimes feels that Ricks is just as strategically narrow-minded as the people that he criticises. He advocates a style of counterinsurgency warfare which he insists would have worked, but at times this model seems to demand a different context from that under which the actual war was fought; I wonder whether the occupiers could have really got from the world in which they found themselves to the alternative world that he envisages.

It should also be noted that the thesis here is that folly and disorganisation is to blame: there is no conspiracy theory, and no inference of actual bad intentions at any level. President Bush is a minor player, Tony Blair little more than a footnote to a story in which individual officers generally take the starring roles. Also, while there are vivid recollections of the combat experience, this is not a "battlefield"-style history and does not attempt a comprehensive overview of developments in the theatre of war as a whole. It will therefore not suit readers of military history attracted by orders of battle and annotated maps. The focus of the book is thus at once both a weakness (since it misses a lot that might appeal to a general reader) and a strength (since what is said is measured and detailed).

Fiasco is undoubtedly a serious and informed discussion of how a high-minded liberation became a high-handed occupation, but it was written while the possibility of ultimate defeat was still being rubbished by the administration and only just being considered by the more critical US media outlets. Those buying over a year further down the road, and from Amazon.co.uk, may find it less illuminating - and certainly less surprising - than did their counterparts across the Atlantic. That said, I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it.

My wife saw this book and assumed from the title that it was an Andy McNab-esque action adventure romp. If only. I had always assumed that modern wars are started for a reason, that modern armies go into battle knowing what they are trying to do and that politicians at least think about what happens next, before they order the tanks and soldiers in. Not in Iraq.

Fiasco is entirely centred on the "American military adventure in Iraq", and it unveils clear and serious failings in the Army - an institution that was ill structured, ill trained and ill equipped to fight a counter insurgency semiwar (campaign? conflict?)

But it is the civilian leadership who come out worst of all. They ignored the facts and the advice of their own soldiers. They had no plan for what would happen after the war. They wanted the Marines to shoot up Fallujah so they did not look weak in the American press. They assumed they'd be welcomed with open arms and never thought "what if we'er not?" Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush - ideological, blind to conflicting viewpoints, deaf to bad news.

In places, what happened defies belief.

So, will you be interested? As an analysis of why things in Iraq have gone the way they have, and what the prospects for the future really are - this is fascinating. And as an insight into the men running the US at the moment - this is very frightening. Recommended

Thomas Ricks pulls no punches in his account of America's invasion and occupation of Iraq. Ricks begins with the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991, one which was unsatisfying to men like Paul Wolfowitz. Throughout the 1990s, this group of neoconservatives kept up a steady drumbeat against Iraq, while the election of George W. Bush in 2000 gave some of them - most notably Wolfowitz and his former deputy 'Scooter' Libby - positions of power within government. Yet Ricks argues that they were on the losing end of the debate to intervene in Iraq until al-Qaeda's attacks on September 11, 2001. The attacks created an opening to reshape foreign policy, one that Ricks sees the neoconservatives as taking full advantage of the opportunity presented to push the administration towards a more aggressive posture internationally, one in which an attack on Iraq would be at the forefront.

With the decision to go to war essentially made by early 2002, the next question was how to win it. Here Ricks places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, which not only believed their unrealistically rosy predictions about what a war would look like, but also insisted that U.S. military planners adopt war plans which fit these expectations, even if the consequences flew in the face of experience and accepted military doctrine. Ricks sees a lot of buck-passing, as everyone stifled their doubts and worked with what they had. Making matters worse was the plan for war itself. Anticipating the type of large-scale armor clash that the Army had been planning for since the Cold War, it imposed a strategy that would prove damaging in retrospect.

None of this seemed to matter in March and April of 2003, as U.S. armored columns roared into Baghdad as if winning some sort of great race. In the aftermath of the capture of the Iraqi capital, the administration celebrated it as the triumphant climax of the war. Yet Ricks views it as only the first battle. Throughout this point, he details the missed opportunities, faulting the blunders of the Pentagon planners, the commanders in the field, and the new head of the occupation authority, Paul Bremmer, for crippling the chance for a peaceful occupation. By the summer of 2003 Iraq had reached a tipping-point, after which an insurgency increasingly challenged U.S. control of the country. Ricks finds the cause for this at many levels, from the willful blindness of the political leadership to the neglect of the Army of the lessons of Vietnam, all of which had a ripple effect in the thousands of encounters between U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. By the spring of 2004 the situation had deteriorated into a level of warfare that the U.S. military had not faced in generations, and while a new set of commanders have attempted to adjust in response, Ricks is pessimistic about the prospects of achieving the type of hopeful outcome so confidently promised in the run-up to the war.

Ricks' book is a powerful and damming indictment of the conduct of the invasion of occupation of Iraq. Relying on thousands of documents and interviews with participants at all levels, he reveals in full detail the decisions and actions that have brought America and Iraq to the current situation there. Few groups come out of it with their reputations intact - the military, the civilian leadership, the media, and the Iraqis all receive a share of the responsibility for the mess described in the title. While a fuller picture would have been enriched Ricks's analysis further still - he covers the roles of both the international coalition and the private contractors in passing only - his is nonetheless the best account available of the ongoing crisis in Iraq, one that is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how we got to where we are today.