CHARLES STEPHEN / For the Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, November 25, 2006 6:00 pm
(“Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” by Thomas E. Ricks, The Penguin Press, 482 pages, $27.95.) One reads this book with a great deal of distress, if not pain, and some anger. From its opening sentence to the end notes, Thomas Ricks leads the reader into the chaos of Iraq, a chaos that numerous journalists and retired military persons have been describing to us for several years.
And Ricks leaves us there with the death toll rising and the civil war booming.
The opening sentence of the book is this: “President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.” Profligate can be defined as immorally wasteful.
While Ricks is critical of the strangely incurious George Bush, the book is not an assault on the president. It is more a study of how civilian and military leadership has combined to create a foreign policy failure that will haunt us for years to come.
As a reporter Ricks spent many months in the early years of the war in Baghdad, and he devotes a large part of the book to how the military dealt with the confused situation it found itself in.
Ricks, a longtime Pentagon correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and now for the Washington Post, is a highly respected military journalist and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. And he clearly understands the military situation in Iraq, having lived with and traveled with the troops. He is a tough critic, not so much of the troops on the ground as he is of some of their bickering leaders, military and civilian.
We went into Iraq with very little planning having been done beyond how our troops would drive north and take Baghdad. We knew how to be conquerors, but not occupiers. For in the neoconservative mindset, it had been decided ahead of time that we would be there for only a short time, only until the summer after the spring invasion.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, had assured the Congress that American troops would be welcomed with flowers, that Iraq’s plentiful oil supply would pay for the costs of the invasion and for the reconstruction that would follow, and that General Shinseki’s estimate that we would need 200,000 troops to occupy Iraq was “outlandish.”
When the rosy scenario offered to the American people by the administration didn’t pan out, those who paid the most, Ricks tells us over and over again, were the American men and women on the ground. In many ways this book tells their story, and it is often a very sad tale. It is also the story of how we have failed them and the Iraqi people. He writes about the failed Coalition Provisional Authority as it was set up and run by Paul Bremer, whose efforts in Baghdad were described by an American colonel as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”
Harshly critical of the administration for its indifference to strategic planning, Ricks is no easier on the Democrats in Congress, whom he calls “lambs” for their unwillingness to raise the right questions about Mr. Bush’s insistence upon war and about postwar planning. He devotes a chapter to the obscenities of Abu Ghraib, which he sees as an absence of leadership, even while all the internal reviews of the brutalities against prisoners “seemed to blame the privates while excusing the generals.”
In time some highly respected military historian will write the definitive study of how this nation was led into a war of choice, with meager planning and irresponsible leadership. That historian will rely on military records and journals, on diaries and interviews, and will produce a multivolumed account of missing WMDs, of government secrecy and military squabbling, of civilian ideologues wanting to reshape the Middle East, of the misuse of our military men and women. When he (or possibly she) does so, the work produced will go deeper, no doubt, than this superb book by Thomas Ricks, but it is hard to imagine that it will be better written, and, surely it will not be as timely as “Fiasco.”
Charles Stephen is co-host of "All About Books," heard weekly on NET Radio.