The Bottom Line
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
By Thomas Ricks
496 pp., Penguin Press (2006)
A detailed, dramatic, riveting account of the policy decisions and tunnel-visioned presumptions of a few members of the Bush administration that led to the failure of the American military occupation in Iraq. The book won't please cheerleaders of the American military, which takes the brunt of the criticism. Thomas Ricks is the military affairs correspondent for the Washington Post. There are no earthshaking revelations here. The book's strength is in its synthesis of failure.
Pros
- Devastating critique of U.S. military strategy in Iraq by 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner
- Clear, declarative style, easy to read, hard to put down
- Based on more than 100 on-the-record interviews and 37,000 pages of documents
- Reporting mixes with analysis and emotional portraits of U.S. soldiers' jobs
- Balanced and unflinching
Cons
- Lacking in historical context and understanding of Iraqi culture
- Too focused on intramural, individual drama rather than big-picture analysis of clashing ideologies
- Story mostly limited to events between March 2003 and end of 2004
- Occasionally falters into journalistic platitudes
- May soon be outdated for all but historians of the war
Description
- Book reads easily thanks to its chronological framework, writes Paul Bellamy in the New Zealand International Review.
- Ricks ignores one of the "genuine successes" of occupation, writes Brian C. McNerney in Military Review: democracy's rise.
- "Extraordinary new insight into the plight of ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs," writes Allen Lane in Middle East.
- L.A. Times: "You can hear the agony of dedicated officers talking about their own errors and those of their bosses."
- Book's big culprits include George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and reporter Judith Miller.
- Ricks calls Bush's Iraq invasion "one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy."
Guide Review - Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq"
The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani called "Fiasco" "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, [...] 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 book has its shortcomings.
"What he does not discuss," Arun Gupta writes provocatively in Arab Studies Quarterly, "is the desire to launch an invasion-lite was probably linked to Bush administration plans to not wear out the military so as to keep the juggernaut rolling into Syria and Iran." Gupta is unconvinced by Ricks' underlying perspective. "At times his narrative takes ludicrous turns, setting up monumental decisions as a clash between villains and heroes" rather than as the end result of a hostile policy against Iraq set in place in the first days of the Bush administration. "Facts that are inconvenient to this story are dismissed or ignored," Gupta writes.