Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas Ricks (2006) (Publisher: Penguin)
We can no longer read anything without checking what prism the writer is using. We (by which I of course mean I) ingest political and historical media from a stance of perpetual skepticism: am I reading something from the Toronto Star or the National Post? National Review or The Nation? CBC? NPR? NYT? Fox? Globe and Mail or Western Standard? Before determining the veracity of an account, in short, we invariably interrogate the source. While it is healthy to constantly query, especially when talking politics, it can quickly shade into a wearying cynicism. Sometimes, rather than being constantly on guard for someone who is trying to pull one over on a reader, you accept the bona fides of the author and just immerse yourself in the narrative.
I finished reading this book a few weeks ago, as I'm in the midst of an Iraq war book jag - and if anyone else has any interest in reading about the war, this book is really among the best I've had the pleasure of reading. Ricks is at his best when he's chronicling the realities of feet on the ground, rather than using a wider lens, such as when he's recounting the steps leading to the invasion or speculating about the future of the country. Because those bookends of his narrative, particularly the pre-invasion period, allow Ricks to relax his analytical rigour, they tend to more obviously betray his political preferences and indulge in foreign policy analysis which doesn't seem to be a particular strength - but even those minor lapses help in making his masterful account of the war itself even more compelling by contrast.
The title of course gives away Ricks' conclusion about the conduct of the mission to topple Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq. After reading this book, it's hard to come away with a starkly different assessment. The notes indicate that Ricks' research comprised tens of thousands of pages of correspondence and hundreds of hours of interviews; many of his sources are on the record in their criticisms of the war effort, and if he's fabricating much, it's an awfully cogent forgery.
Whatever his criticisms of the Bush Administration, Ricks writes with an obvious depth of knowledge about and respect for the American military. The bitterness of many of his interview subjects can't help but emerge in the recounting, and so this is a profoundly depressing read. It seems that whatever could have gone wrong (whether from intention, negligence or accident) did: the litany of mistakes and missed opportunities is staggering. Ricks determines that a familiar set of deficiencies resulted in the current situation: a failure to comprehensively plan for the post-invasion occupation period; a lack of sufficnet numbers of troops; a fatal discord between the military authorities and the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority; a failure to implement counter-insurgency tactics and, when they were implemented, a failure to maintain them over the long term; communications failures, strategic failures, failures of will - it becomes painful to read. Some of the mistakes are cringe-inducing - such as when it is recounted that, as coalition troops moved towards Baghdad, they came across and then left unguarded literally tons of weapons which were cached in depots; because of insufficient troop numbers, the caches were left behind unguarded, thus providing a handy source of materiel for insurgents; because of a (misplaced) fear that the depots might be repositories of bio-chemical weapons, they weren't destroyed.
Many of the detailed stories here (of the battles for Falluja, or Tal Afar, for example) are riveting. Interspersed among the reportage are gems of military history and philosophy. And ultimately the reader is left with a book which explains so much, in such a satisfactory fashion, that you can't help but enthusiastically recommend it. It's obviously not the entire story, but it's a required component of any fair assessment. Anyone who has any interest in the Iraq war should be reading this book.
Grade: A
Recommendation: Buy (on the Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother metric)
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