Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq -- Thomas E. Ricks: A Book Review

The Penguin Press, 2006

To date, Fiasco, written by the Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, Thomas E. Ricks, may be the most damning expository penned about the assinine incompetence and sheer arrogance of an authoritarian leadership run amok -- the Bush administration.  Ricks details the willful disregard of basic intelligence reports and the ramming through of an unrealistic makeover agenda that was neither justified by any known set of facts at hand nor properly planned as a viable military affair or reconstruction/follow-up process.  Not only did Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, and Paul Bremer attempt to remake Iraq into a Mesopotamian America, but they were hellbent on doing it without foresight, without proper intelligence, without expertise, without proper manpower, and without conscience. 

Fiasco begins in 1991 with background material for the set-up to the decade of "containment" of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the emergence of Haliburton as the world's largest and most influential government contractor and logistics support corporation (thanks to President George H. W. Bush's then Secretary of Defense and later CEO of Haliburton Dick Cheney), and the building of a house-of-cards case against Saddam Hussein that would culminate in the poorly contrived justification for invading Iraq because of its ties with terrorist organization al Qaeda and its stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction and nascent nuclear capability.

Ricks provides us with a detailed account of mismanagement and overreach, pompousity and stupidity.  From the hurried planning of the invasion of Iraq (which, by the way, was carried out admirably and efficiently -- for the most part -- by American troops) to the unthinkably ludicrous nonplanning of a post-war reconstruction phase (known as Phase IV) for the occupied Iraq to the even more disastrously mishandled Coalition Provisional Authority (or Can't Produce Anything) under Chief Paul Bremer, which would somehow "lose" $9 billion in allocated funds, do absolutely nothing for the shattered infrastructure of Iraq, alienate the Sunni population through de-Baathification (eliminating Saddam Hussein's political party), dissolving the Iraqi army, and barely put in place an interim Iraqi government before Bremer would sneak out of Baghdad.  Add to this the various mistakes made by the American military presence -- Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, various murders, unclear operational procedures (most of this due to bureaucratic miscommunication, noncommunication, and Rumsfeld's corporate reengineering of the American military machine) -- and the ignorance with which the American occupation dealt with Iraq in general and you have the title of Ricks' book.

Fiasco. 

Regardless of one's political affiliation, Fiasco is a ringing indictment of an administration focused on going to war and how they totally made it one huge SNAFU.  And although the Pentagon and the military establishment cannot be considered altogether blameless, much of the quagmire that became and is Iraq today can be attributed to the Bush administration and its party cronyism, general and pervasive ineptitude, and ignorant arrogance.  Ricks has done a superb job of "keeping them honest" with a plethora of facts, documents, and personal first-hand accounts.  Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq is a must read for anyone interested in history, political science, diplomacy, and the current American imperialistic movement.  It is also a basic primer on how to start an insurgency and how not to conduct foreign policy, military occupations, and infrastructural change.