After a week of struggling I have finally managed to finish reading Thomas Ricks excellent account FIASCO -- The American Military Adventure in Iraq.  I struggled, in part because I've been so sick, but mostly it would take an average of 10 pages for me to get so furious, or so disheartened, or otherwise upset that I would have to put the book down and pick it up later on.  Ricks account of this war is not an easy read.  Nor should it be.  But having finished it I say that without a doubt all Americans have a civic duty to read this book and understand the nature of this war.  Like it or not...

I implore you to read this book.  I first heard about it during an NPR interview with the author.  Click that link if you want to hear the interview.

Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, a member of 2 Pulitzer Prize winning journalistic teams, and formerly a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, has in the past been known to be evenhanded if not favorable toward the military.  Considering the title of this work, this alone should give people pause.  Upon opening the book and finding that the most damning commentary regarding the mishandling of the intelligence, planning, and prosecution of the ongoing war comes almost entirely from military officials or experts working with the military, only the most vapidly partisan would be able to dismiss it all away as liberal propaganda.

I've followed the war news since 2003, always with a sense of despair for our dear enlisted men and women.  I still believe America needs to stay and fix what it has wrought in Iraq.  But I am not a military person myself, nor do I claim to have any knowledge of tactics or strategy.  But now, having read Ricks account of the war, I have a better understanding of the situation, which makes it clear that it is far worse than I realized.

Ricks approach to the material is intelligent.  There's no armchair quarterbacking going on here. Counterinsurgencies have been fought many times in history, they are well documented, military historians can tell you what did and did not work... it's not a matter of opinion--it's a matter of historical record.  Ricks carefully documents how the American military by and in large made the worst possible choices in its operations in Iraq and thereby created the insurgency, doing things that history has repeatedly shown lead to failed counterinsurgencies.

However the book begins long before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, all the way back to 1991 and the end of the first Gulf War.  It traces the roots of the current conflict, citing the pricinciple players responsible for bringing it about, and those who acted against it.  It covers the war planning, and makes clear that there really was no significant post-war plan.

Ricks demonstrates that much of our armed forces are conventional and are therefore trained for and interested in fighting conventional wars.  One of the many problems was that the conventional war ended very quickly leaving our military in charge of things they were not trained for because they had not been foreseen.  The chuckleheads who got us into this war literally believed that there would be no insurgency, that the Americans would be seen as liberators, that a new Iraqi government would be established quickly, and that American troops would start to draw down within a few months of the capture of Bagdad.  Perhaps most shocking of all are the repeated examples of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld ignoring the advice of military officers.

Ricks source material comes from countless interviews with military personell, direct experience during his own trips to Iraq, printed news from the time period, studies and analyses performed by think tanks, military experts, and military agencies, and thousands upon thousands of internal military documents--briefs, e-mails, memos, reports, etc.  The book covers everything, Chalabi, Abu Graib, many of the significant battles, the CPA, the friction between the Pentagon and the State Department.  No one is left off the hook, even the media is taken to task for its role.

Fiasco concludes with three possible outcomes from the "best case" to the "nightmare scenario" where Ricks applies his impressive military knowledge to the situation we are in now.  Trust me, none of these are particularly rosy, and if he's right there will be American troops in Iraq for many years to come.

I'll close with a few quotes from the book that have stayed with me:

"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.  This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored crucial differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action.  The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda.  The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] but rather a detour from it." -- Jeffrey Record, Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute

"There was no real plan.  The thought was, you didn't need it.  The assumption was that everything would be fine after the war, that they'd be happy they got rid of Saddam." -- Lt. General Joseph Kellogg

"When they disbanded the military, and announced we were occupiers--that was it.  Every moderate, every person that had leaned toward us, was furious.  One Iraqi who had saved my life in an ambush said to me, 'I can't be your friend anymore.'" -- Colonel Alan King

"Coalition forces are forced to interact with the Iraqi populace from a defensive posture, effectively driving a psychological wedge between the people and their protectors." -- Major General Peter Chiarelli

"Then he told my platoon sergeant to 'take them out back and beat the fuck out of them'" -- unnamed officer in 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment

"There is a total lack of security in the streets, partly because of the insurgents, partly because of criminals, and partly because the security forces can be dangerous to Iraqi citizens, too." -- Army Reserve Captain A. Heather Coyne

"Boss, we're losing." -- unnamed Major advising Lt. General Thomas Metz.