'Fiasco' Details American Strategic Failure in Iraq

Bruce Ramsey has provided this well-balanced book review to The Seattle Times ...

"Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq"

by Thomas E. Ricks

Penguin Press, 482 pp., $27.95

Of the war books now landing like mortar shells in our midst, "Fiasco" is making people jump. Its author, Thomas E. Ricks, covers the military for The Washington Post, and knows it well. His story of the Iraq adventure is now on bestseller lists, and deservedly so.

If the news is the first cut at history, and monthlies the second, books like this are the third. Ricks has had a couple of years to organize and think about most of his material, and he has gone a long way in making sense of it. Still, he is a writer of newspaper stories, and his book reflects that. Every page or two brings a mini-headline and a switch from one story line to another. This keeps the book easy to read but also makes it easy to put down.

The first quarter of the book, which is about the arguments before America went to war, is the most gripping and deeply considered. Ricks profiles Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, an early champion of belligerency, and reveals how Wolfowitz's family's losses in the Holocaust shaped the way he thinks. The war party, Ricks says, had not convinced President Bush to invade Iraq until 9/11. Ricks argues that Bush and his senior advisers wanted a fight, and deceived themselves as well as the public about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction."

For America to go to war for the wrong reasons, Ricks writes, required more than self-deception in the executive branch. It required "major lapses in several major American institutions." One was Congress, where the Republicans cheered for their president's war and the Democrats, who had learned that antiwar leaders lose elections, went along. Another inert institution was the press, which is bold only when it can quote the boldness of somebody else. Then there were the officers of the intelligence community, who knew the information they saw did not justify a war but imagined that the Bush people were seeing something much clearer.

Ricks is at his best explaining how beliefs and institutional bias shaped the result. The assault on Iraq went well, he says, because that was what the Army was trained for. It had not planned for an occupation or for crushing an insurrection, and had no good strategy for that.

Ricks explains the difference between strategy and tactics, how the second flows from the first. The strategy for a war might be to defeat the enemy by destroying his army in battle; the tactics might be a particular form of tank assault. For crushing an insurrection, Ricks says, the best strategy is to win over the people -- a strategy that implies a certain restraint. Part of the problem at Abu Ghraib, he says, was that most of the Iraqis imprisoned there were not rebels, and many were held because the 4th Infantry Division was following the wrong tactics.

The American military, as pictured in this book, made some big mistakes. But the military has some leaders who remember history -- he profiles several in the book -- and adjust their policy. Ricks is much harsher on the politicians, who have a greater freedom to be delusionary. It was civilian authority under Paul Bremer that dissolved the Iraqi army and dismantled state enterprises, creating chaos when the military's goal was stability.

The book covers in-depth the run-up to the war and the first year, skimming thereafter. By the later chapters the subject is more purely military, and some readers may lose patience with it.

"Fiasco" is the story of the occupation of a country Americans did not understand, done for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. Ricks ends by saying that Iraq has been greatly damaged, which will have repercussions for many years. His analysis does not leave the reader with much hope for a good end.