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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 4   jcbrunner | Aug 9, 2009 |  Fiasco was a very illuminating book, but was also very frustrating. Illuminating because Ricks details exactly how and why the U.S. went wrong in prosecuting the war in Iraq. Frustrating because he supports his narrative mostly with interviews rather than data. (Full review at my blog) (  ) KingRat | Mar 11, 2009 | jmnlman | Dec 10, 2008 | From a war hawk who greatly appreciated the research: I got done reading most of the book `Fiasco' before I went home on leave. It was a pretty good book, really well written, very well researched, and easy to read. The author covers almost all the major points in the war and has clearly interviewed a lot of people and done a lot of research on the war. The author gets a few things right. He is almost obsessed in his criticism of the Bush administration, to the point where he contradicts his own self in the book. The book reads as an `everything the Bush administration ever did was wrong' critique. In the book the author: --Describes flaws in the US Army's warfighting policies. The army proved good at destroying the standing army in front of them, but wholly inadequate fighting terrorists. And really inadequate at fighting most of the likely post cold war opponents that they might have to fight. The author mentions the Army policy of running away when attacked in a convoy. Just on the day of Saddam's verdict I was on an army convoy, I asked what the SOP was if we were to be attacked, and the answer was to run away, to disengage. No matter how good armor is, it can be defeated with enough tries. --See's some but not most flaws of the US State Dept. --Rightfully points out some of the awesomeness of the US Marine Corps. --Points out the disastrous results of forcing General Conway's hands in Falluja. The general said that they had a plan, and that they shouldn't be rushed. If done properly the taking of Falluja would only need to be done once. There were established good counterinsurgency tactics and procedures that the Marines were set to follow. But the death of the Blackwater guys caused an outcry for "something to be done" for bombs to be dropping. So Politics, and politicians forced the Marines to act prematurely. --Points out the disastrous results of tying Conway's hands after forcing the Marines into action prematurely and not according to the plan. After the Marines were ordered to please political pundits by forcing the action in Falluja, imagery of the death and destruction caused an outcry, and then Conway was ordered to cease. This effectively put Falluja and Ramadi in enemy's hands. Even when they were eventually retaken by force the damage was done, and the population, which are the prize of a guerilla war, were lost. --Accurately points out some of the disastrous results of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The author really does a swell job of pointing out the mistakes that have been made in the war. And there really have been a lot of mistakes made. One useful thing the author does do in the book is contradict some of the stupider conspiracy theories about the Bush administration, and about invading Iraq being the policy of the administration before 9/11 ever happened. He accurately and believably describes how the events of 9/11 forced the leaders of the administration to change their policy of non nation building, and of staying out of the affairs of foreign countries. The author is a big fan of General Anthony Zinny, as am I. And there is much mention of the military not using Zinny's plan to invade Iraq. And perhaps Zinni's plan would have solved many of the problems that there are now. From what the author describes it seems like Zinni's plan was a good one. But maybe if Zinni thought that containment was working, maybe his assessment of an invasion plan was also off. The author maintains that Bush Sr, and then Clinton had a working policy of containment in Iraq. And the author derides Wolfowitz for maintaining that something different needed to be done. Contrary to the author's assertions containment did not work. It was working for the Russians, the Germans and the French who were dealing with Saddam, but it was not working so well for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children that were dieing of starvation. And the Arab world was seeing that, if our own public was not, and the population of the Arab world was not blaming Saddam or the French for the images of starving Arab children, they were blaming us. The containment policy also brought about the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the Khobar Towers, the bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, and several other high profile terrorist attacks. The containment policy brought us 9/11. The direct result of having troops in Saudi Arabia to contain Saddam Hussein was the planes flying into buildings in NYC. The containment policy was not a success. Something had to change. Wofowitz was right about that. Bush's policy of invading Iraq has brought about much crying. I mean, Iraq sucks. It does. Iraqi citizens are being subject to terrorists, criminals, religious militias, and such on a daily basis, and US troops are being killed in the effort to help them out. But we are fighting. Yes we are making mistakes, and we are also making not mistakes. Our military is learning, and sometimes it isn't. We are putting forth an effort. And we may or may not be successful in creating a free and prosperous Iraq. A free and prosperous oasis in the middle east that is an ocean of genocidal tyrant dictators. Can it be done? Can we be successful? I think so. Our bureaucracies might prevent it from working out. The Army the CIA, the State Dept are all bureaucracies that were in no way ready to do the right thing here. But for the millions of taxpayer money spent on those institutions they should have been. If they can't do this, if they can't learn and do what they are supposed to do, they should re-think there reason to exist. Despite all of this, I think everyone over here in Iraq should read the book. It is well documented, and the book does a very good job of pointing out mistakes made. If we can't learn from our mistakes we will not prevail. mugwump2 | Nov 29, 2008 | Douglas Feith was the Under Secretary for Policy in the Department of Defense. He couldn't believe the intelligence reports he was receiving so he decided he would make up his own intelligence that fit his views. Part of his views came from Ahmed Chalabi the Iraqi expatriate who ultimately lost all credibility. Feith was heavily involved in post war planning and he didn't want to hear from experts who had developed scenarios that indicated a long U.S. presence in Iraq. He didn't want to hear worst case scenarios. The plan he liked best was the in and out of Iraqi in a couple of months scenario. This was the beginning of the Fiasco described in this book. The army was prepared only to reach Baghdad. Anyone who thought there would be problems after that was muffled. Author Ricks's book is mostly concerned with our military exploits in Iraq. He feels strongly that Generals Franks and Sanchez were not up to the job. When L. Paul Bremer arrived on the scene to start up the Coalition Provisional Authority things didn't get better. When someone started talking to Bremer about his experiences with insurgency fighting in Viet Nam, Bremer told him he didn't want to hear about Viet Nam. French author Col. Roger Trinquier's book on the war in Algeria was known and read at the Fort Leavenworth's School of Advanced Military Studies. It could reasonably considered to be a bible on insurgency warfare yet its recommendations were all but ignored. The basic concept to be learned from past experience is that an occupying force must live among the people in order to gain their support. If you have their support then they will not aid the insurgents. Easy prescription for success? Yes, but it was rarely followed. The military live there in air-conditioned encampments with all the comforts of home. Shoot first and ask questions later was often the policy. Marine Major General James Mattis thoroughly believed in the "live with them" approach, and when he was assigned to the Fallujah area he had trained his troops to be part of the population. When he took over he was quickly ordered to conduct a major insurgency campaign involving going house to house through the whole city to root out the enemy. His protests about this approach went unheeded. He then engaged in battle, and when he was close to achieving victory he was ordered to back down. He protested again, and again was not listened to. Fallujah was once again a terrorist stronghold. Well you get the idea. The upshot of this tale is that nothing was planned for. No one wanted to hear from anyone with dissenting views. When General Garner was appointed to head up the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance he found a gentleman named Tom Warrick who exhibited an extraordinary expertise in Iraqi affairs. Shortly after he was hired VP Cheney passed down the word to have him fired. Warrick's views did not coincide with those of the administration. Another amazing thing about this book is the recounting of the childish rivalry between the State Department and the Pentagon. I sure wish someday people in the Administration could act like grown ups. Ricks interviewed numerous people, and fills the book with quotations. When he seems a bit hard on someone he often quotes people with a different point of view. This is an amazing book that often reads like a thriller. It is difficult for me to understand how anyone could read this book, and not realize that things went horribly wrong in our invasion of Iraq. Some other reviewers have nit picked at things in the book, but seem to not see the forest for the trees. As Ricks is mostly concerned with military operations he doesn't dwell much on the civil administration other than to castigate Bremer from time to time. I am currently reading "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran which is mainly concerned with civil affairs. These two books together cover much of the whole Iraqi affair. I might mention too that where the Emerald City book overlaps Fiasco there is a high degree of accord between the two. A must read book. (  ) bucherwurm | Apr 3, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 159420103X, Hardcover)Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps, has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Iraq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in early 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds responsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--the runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from books like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more skeptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the heart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, when, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His strongest critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and then failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it with conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes his portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sources--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the thousands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case for a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. --Tom NissleyMaking a Fiasco Amazon.com: As military correspondent for the Post, you have made five trips to Iraq over the last four years. How has it changed over that time? Thomas E. Ricks: It has been markedly worse each time, in terms of security. On my first trip, in April-May 2003, we would walk out on the streets of Baghdad at night, albeit with caution. Even on my second trip, in the summer of 2003, I would feel comfortable hopping in a car and driving 100 miles north from Baghdad to Tikrit. To do either of those things now would be suicidal. In January and February of this year, Baghdad felt worse to me Mogadishu did when I was there in 1993 or Sarajevo did when I was there a few years later. It appeared to me that there was no security, except what you provided for yourself with armed men and careful planning. One Army major described the city to me as being in "the pure Hobbesian state" in which everybody is fighting everybody. By the way, contrary to what I see asserted occasionally, most reporters don't live in the Green Zone, the walled-off area in central Baghdad that is the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Reporters live out in the city, and I think generally have a better feel for what is going on than do people living in the Zone or on big American military bases. In the area of Baghdad I stayed in, I constantly heard gunfire and explosions. Yet an American colonel told me that my neighborhood was deemed "secure." I think that really meant that U.S. troops could drive through it while heavily armed--say, with a .50 caliber machine gun atop a Humvee--and usually not be attacked. I worry that what the Americans measure are threats to U.S. troops and the killings of Iraqis. That neglects a huge spectrum of other significant activities--rapes, robberies, kidnappings, acts of extortion, and, most importantly, acts of violent intimidation. Amazon.com: You cite many strategic errors in the planning and execution of the war, but perhaps the central one is that the U.S. military leadership failed to recognize that they were fighting an insurgency, and their methods of fighting in fact helped to create that insurgency. Can you explain those methods, and their effects? Ricks: The U.S. military that went into Iraq in 2003 was the best military in the world for fighting another military. But it was woefully unprepared for the task at hand. For example, U.S. military culture believes in bringing overwhelming force to bear. Yet classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for using only the minimal amount of force necessary to get the job done. U.S. soldiers and their commanders, untrained and unschooled in the difficult art of counterinsurgency, tended to improvise. So in the summer of 2003, some soldiers in Baghdad decided that the best way to deter looters was to make them cry--and they sometimes did this by threatening to shoot the children of looters, and even conducting mock executions. More broadly, the Army in the fall of 2003 fell back on what it knew how to do, which was conduct large-scale "cordon-and-sweep" operations. These missions scarfed up thousands of Iraqis, most of them fence-sitting neutrals, and detained them. U.S. military intelligence officials later concluded that 85% of those detained were of no intelligence value. The detention experience frequently was humiliating for Iraqis, a violation of another key counterinsurgency principle: Treat your prisoners well. (Your readers who want to know more about this should read a terrific little book by David Galula titled Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice.) Not every unit was ineffective or counterproductive. I was struck at how successful the 101st Airborne was in Mosul in 2003-04. And some units showed remarkable improvement--the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment had a mediocre first tour of duty in Iraq, but when it went back in 2005 for a second tour, it did extremely well. Col. H.R. McMaster, the regimental commander (and author of a very good book about the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty) told his troops that, "Every time you disrespect an Iraqi, you are working for the enemy." I was especially struck by how his regiment handled its prisoners--it even had a program called "Ask the Customer" that quizzed detainees when they were released about whether they felt treated well. This recognized the lesson of past wars that the best way to end an insurgency is to get its leaders to put down their guns and enter the political system, and to get the rank-and-file to desert or switch sides. But it will be harder to discuss the sewage system with the new mayor next year if your troops beat him in his cell when he was your prisoner last year. Amazon.com: But today's military leadership was formed in Vietnam, when all of those lessons of counterinsurgency were supposedly learned before. Why didn't that experience translate into a preparation for the current conflict? Ricks: Military experts, such at Andrew Krepinevich (The Army and Vietnam) and Lt. Col. John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) say that after that war ended, the Army washed its hands of the entire experience and essentially concluded that it was never going to do anything like that again. It was almost as if the very word "counterinsurgency" was banned from official Army discourse. In Iraq, there was a tiny minority of American soldiers early on who understood how to win the occupation. These generally were civil affairs officers and other Special Forces types. But their wisdom often was disregarded. "What you are seeing here is an unconventional war being fought conventionally," one Special Forces lieutenant colonel glumly commented one day in Baghdad. Amazon.com: You've been writing about the military for the Post and the Wall Street Journal for years now, and Fiasco is built from the testimony of a remarkable array of sources up and down the chain of command, some off the record but many more on the record. Can you talk about your sources? Is this level of public criticism of a war from within the military precedented?? Ricks: Yeah, reporting the book was a pretty emotional experience. Even having covered this war as it unfolded, I was taken aback by the rage that some officers felt toward the Bush Administration, and especially toward Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. And also toward Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the no. 2 guy at the Pentagon. I think the rage is probably like what the military felt about Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. What is unprecedented, I think, is that many officers had doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, especially in the way we did it. The emotions also hit me pretty hard at times, especially when I was writing my chapter 13, about how widespread abuse was by American soldiers in 2003-04, often because they hadn't been trained for the mission they faced. I have spent more than 15 years covering the military. I tend to like and admire these people. So when I learned about a 4th Infantry Division soldier shooting an unarmed, handcuffed Iraqi detainee in the stomach, and the investigating MPs saying the soldier should be charged with homicide, and instead the commander simply discharged the soldier from the Army--well, that bothered me. Another thing that struck me with sources was the mountain of information that was available. I read over 30,000 pages of documents for this book. At the end of one interview a guy gave me a CD-ROM with every e-mail he had sent to Ambassador Bremer, who ran the civilian end of the first year of the occupation. Other people showed me diaries, unit logs, official briefings, and such. Also the ACLU did a great job of obtaining and releasing piles of official U.S. military documents related to abuse--so I could see the time stamp on an e-mail in which an intelligence officer stated that "the gloves are coming off" in interrogations, and one soldier recommended blows to the chest while another wrote back recommending low-level electrocution. Unfortunately the Army wouldn't release the details of citations for valorous acts by soldiers, which means that the Pentagon made it easier for me to learn about the sins of soldiers than about their acts of bravery. The Marine Corps did give me those "narratives" that support the bestowing of medals, which I really appreciated. Those documents really brought home to me the fierceness of the two Battles of Fallujah, in April and November 2004--probably the toughest fighting American troops have seen since Hue and Khe Sanh in the Vietnam War. Amazon.com: In the last section of the book, you project a variety of possible scenarios for the next 10 years in the Middle East, mostly grim ones, and just in the past two weeks the sudden violence between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is leading to talk of a wider regional conflict. Where do you think those events are leading us? Ricks: We are really in unexplored territory. We are carrying out the first-ever U.S. occupation of an Arab nation. This is also almost the first time we have engaged in sustained combat ground war with an all-volunteer force. (I think the suppression of the Philippines insurrection might count as a small precedent.) Even more significantly, I think the Bush Administration doesn't really like "stability" in the Middle East. In its view, "stability" has been the goal of previous administrations, but pursuing it led to 9/11. It is not the goal, it is the target. So they are for rolling the dice, both in Iraq and in Lebanon. I think the big worry is those wars spilling over borders. Fasten your seat belts. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:56 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Thomas Ricks spent five tours in Iraq during the war, reporting for the Washington Post and researching and writing Fiasco. Like many of the officers he most admires, when he wanted to understand what was happening as American troops encountered stronger and longer-lived resistance to the occupation than expected, he turned to recent and classic accounts of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines through the lessons of Vietnam, and he reports on his favorites for us in his list of the 10 books for understanding Iraq that aren't about Iraq. You can also get a glimpse into his writing process with a much different list he has prepared for us: the music he listened to while writing and researching the book, from Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell to Ryan Adams and Josh Ritter. And he took the time to answer a few questions about Fiasco: 
First, the book is highly biased. Ricks only quotes people to the right of the conservative-in-the-orginal-meaning Andrew Bacevich (the only exception is Juan Cole who is allowed to offer two factual inputs.). Much of the original controversies are simply air-brushed out of the picture. Ricks' primary mission is to shield his friends from criticism. There are various circles of friends, starting with the Washington Post and other print titles, the US Marines, the US army, the US army reserves, the United States of America, allies of the United States of America and the rest of the world. If the story absolutely, positively requires Ricks to point fingers at some of his friends, the circle concept comes into play, e.g. the New York Times' Judith Miller is offered as a scapegoat, nicely diluting the equally unprofessional cheer-leading of Ricks' own paper.
Secondly, the book assumes readers with ADD both in regard to external facts and to the text itself. An example of a non-mentioned fact: "This new emphasis (on the operational level) also was meant to address what the Army had decided was a major failing during the Vietnam War" (p. 131). It is beside the point that I do not agree with this analysis that Vietnam was an operational failure, the important fact is that this analysis leaves out what came to be known as the Powell Doctrine ("Do we have a clear attainable objective? Is there a plausible exit strategy?"), which itself was based on the Weinberger Doctrine compiling the lessons of the Vietnam War. If the US had made sure to answer the questions of either doctrine, the quagmire might never have happened.
"Petraeus, now at Fort Leavenworth, ... made the thousands of Army officers who were students there also begin to study this peculiar way of war (ie COIN), so unlike what the U.S. Army had studied for the previous three decades" (p. 414), conveniently ignoring all the published lessons of Somalia, Kosovo, ... (such as the vulnerability of helicopters in close terrain). Ricks' faulty memory approach lets the US military off the hook far too easily.
Thirdly, this book, like so many others, plays down US war crimes. While Ricks presents many clear cases of war crimes, he hardly ever comments or discusses these cases. He simply notes that the US military justices sends the criminals home (fining them all of USD 5.000 for murder, if they prosecute at all) where they live happy lives as high school teachers. Remedial lessons about the Geneva conventions and the laws of war should be a high priority for any US unit. Can it really be a lessons learned that treating civilians with dignity is good?
Fourth, the book establishes easy scapegoats in Rumsfeld, Chalabi and those Neo-Cons. The failure and incompetence of the military-industrial complex runs much deeper. Within Ricks' cherished Marine Corps, the Warrior ethos is to blame with its COIN-unsuitable world-view. Generals such as James "It's fun to shoot some people" Mattis are part of the problem and the destruction of Fallujah the consequence of their actions.
If the book's purpose is to have the military-industrial complex rethink and refine its approach, it has failed. If entertainment and glorification of Ricks' circle of friends is its purpose, it succeeds. (