Wash Post Correspondent's Book Fiasco Explains How "Bush's Decision To Invade Iraq... May Come To Be Seen As One Of The Most Profligate Actions"

In US History

NY Times MICHIKO KAKUTANI July 25, 2006 at 12:23 PM
READ MORE: Iraq, Saddam Hussein, 9/11, Washington Post

The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: "Fiasco." That is the judgment that Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, passes on the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and its management of the war and the occupation. And he serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive.

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.

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