Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

From the Publisher

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.

Los Angeles Times

Fiasco is not a screed but a well-researched, strongly written account of the miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all.... Absolutely essential reading ... [This] volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope.

The Washington Post

Compelling and well-researched ... Fiasco pulls no punches.... News on Iraq usually comes with blaring headlines, but Ricks' work allows us to fit seemingly disparate events into an overall pattern.

The New York Times Book Review

A comprehensive and illuminating portrait of the willful blindness of the Bush administration to Iraqi realities.

Slate.com

It is not an exaggeration, or at least not much of one, to say that with his new book, Fiasco, Thomas Ricks has changed the debate over Iraq.... It may leave your hand shaking just a bit when you finish and put it down. (Slate.com)

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

By virtue of the author's wealth of sources within the American military and the book's comprehensive timeline (beginning with the administration's inflammatory statements about Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11, through the invasion and occupation, to the escalating religious and ethnic strife that afflicts the country today), Fiasco is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how the United States came to go to war in Iraq, how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency and how these events will affect the future of the American military. Though other books have depicted aspects of the Iraq war in more intimate and harrowing detail, though other books have broken more news about aspects of the war, this volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple coherence and scope.

The Washington Post - Daniel Byman

Indeed, the picture Ricks paints is so damning that it is, at times, too charitable to say that the military and civilian leadership failed. Fiasco portrays several commanders as misguided but trying their best, but others -- particularly the hapless Franks -- appear not to have tried at all. Worse, the overall war and occupation effort lacked the high-level White House coordination essential to victory, allowing Bremer to operate on his own, making major decisions without consulting the Pentagon or the National Security Council, let alone his counterparts on the military side of the occupation … Ricks begins Fiasco with the ancient strategist Sun Tzu's admonition about how to achieve victory: "Know your enemies, know yourself." Clearly, those who took us to war in 2003 knew neither. The question today is whether they can learn.

Library Journal

Why the war in Iraq angers the military, as told by senior officers to the Washington Post's top Pentagon correspondent. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

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Table of Contents