‘Fiasco’ strong accounting of war mistakes

“Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq”

by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin, 482 pages, $27.95)

Once it was fashionable for literature majors to opine that all good books began with a dramatic first sentence that sets the tone. “Call me Ishmael” often was cited.

Without a military draft, today’s college students appear little concerned about the war in Iraq. But if they were, Thomas E. Ricks’ new book would fit the first-sentence-tells-all category:

“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,” Ricks writes at the beginning of “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.”

If that is not punch enough, he follows up quickly: “Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”

Ricks, The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon reporter, rounds up the usual suspects – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and former New York Times reporter Judith Miller among them.

He pins on this group a large share of blame for the intelligence failures, the misinformation about weapons of mass destruction, and the political hyperventilating that led Bush to order the March 2003 rush toward Baghdad.

But Ricks goes much further and finds plenty of blame to go around. Few, if any, journalists know the U.S. military better than Ricks – its organizational strengths, its flaws, its capacity for battlefield heroism and its tendency to do the wrong thing with the right motive.

The Iraq war, he charges, was “launched recklessly,” in part because of Bush’s “incompetence and arrogance.” Worse, the U.S. occupation after the fall of Baghdad was “agonizingly incompetent.”

Yet “Fiasco” is not a screed, but a well-researched, strongly written account of the miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize winner, had access to top officers and their planning as well as “after-action” documents. More important, he was accorded candor.

Much of the mess, he concludes, began with the Army and the Pentagon bureaucracy, their institutional rigidity, a lack of planning for combating an insurgency, and some poor personnel choices.

One theme of “Fiasco” is the disconnect between the military in the field and the civilian leaders of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who were embedded in the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad – notably ambassador L. Paul Bremer III.

The military and civilian leaders spoke different languages and after Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down, they lacked a unified command or a comprehensive post-invasion plan. And neither really understood the social structure in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence officers would monitor cell phones and the Internet to identify insurgent leaders: “So long sessions with top commanders would focus on the movements of four Saudi Arabian citizens while entire tribes in the Sunni Triangle were emerging unnoticed as centers of the insurgency,” Ricks writes.

On page after page, you can hear the agony of dedicated officers talking about their own errors and those of their bosses, civilian and military.

If there is a moral to “Fiasco,” it might come in the chapter about the United States’ confused approach to dealing with Iraqi civilians in the first 18 months of the occupation:

“By failing to adequately consider strategic questions, Rumsfeld, Franks and other top leaders arguably crippled the beginning of the U.S. mission to transform Iraq. … A confused strategy can be every bit as lethal as a bullet.”