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The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Penguin
August 2006
496 pages
ISBN: 159420103X
EAN: 9781594201035
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
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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