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Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | List Price: $27.95
Discount Price: $7.22
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Binding: Hardcover
The story of an incredible American folly [Posted on 2008-09-13]
Amazing that such a book could be written about a war that is still going on. The existence of this book, if not its horrifying contents, have given me back some faith in the freedom we are (or should be) fighting for.
Clearly the recent "surge" that has brought about such a significant reduction in violence in Iraq is based upon all the costly lessons the Americans learned in the first four calamitous years of the Iraq War, as set out in this book. It would be a terrible waste if all those gains were to be lost by US domestic political opportunism, which might pull the troops out too soon. The Americans already lost one war they had already won on the ground (Vietnam) due to misguided domestic pressures, I hope they don't do it again.
Pleasantly Surprised [Posted on 2008-09-18]
Since 2003, the people who had negative thoughts about Iraq were usually the people who were not very well informed. Although this book holds a more liberal point of view, the technique that Ricks' uses in his countless interviews with everyone from Privates to 4 Star Generals was amazing. He rarely inserts his own opinion in the book and lets the information speak for itself...so that the reader can either disagree or agree with the information presented to him/her. This is a great read for anyone who is interested in the war in Iraq, anyone who loves military reading, or anyone who is being deployed to Iraq. It holds a lot of good information on why we have been failing over there and what we can do to better our chances of stopping the insurgency. Great read, I strongly recommend it.
Fantastic [Posted on 2008-09-30]
What a book. The true behind the scenes revelation of how and why the Iraq war happened. No BS just the facts.
Despite All the Planning, Rumsfeld Had No Plan [Posted on 2008-11-27]
Mr. Ricks argues that the invasion of Iraq "was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history," an incomplete plan that confused removing Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.
The result of going in with too few troops and no larger strategic plan, he says, was that the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d'état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.
The four hundred plus pages move along pretty fast and Ricks to his credit, lets the facts tell the story without extensive or heavy-handed direct criticism of President Bush or then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
I think Fiasco along with Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 are the two best books about the Iraq war to date. Recommended.
Excellent Book! [Posted on 2008-12-31]
"Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" is an excellent, clear-sighted, and well-named review of the numerous mistakes which hindered success in the Iraq conflict. As military correspondent for "The Washington Post" and the author of "Making the Corps" Mr. Ricks writes with considerable and deserved authority and this is one of the best of many recent books on this subject.
The most important lesson in this book is that the Army and Marine Corps did not recognize (for some time) that their enemy was an insurgency and required a set of solutions other than the application of sheer combat power. That failure of recognition is not surprising. The Army and the Marine Corps were doctrinally organized, trained, and equipped to fight and destroy a conventional enemy. The Army had not updated its counterinsurgency doctrine for 20 years and, even then, it had not integrated the counterinsurgency lessons from the war in Vietnam. The foremost discussion on that failure was John A. Nagl's book " Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam." Nagl compared the practice of counterinsurgency by the British Army in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960, and the American military in the Vietnam War, to the pronounced detriment of the Americans. Ricks demonstrates that the lessons remained unlearned.
Much has changed. The Army and Marine Corps developed and published new counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006 and, together with "the surge" of additional troops, have applied that doctrine to good effect in Iraq. Those beneficial changes, however, demonstrate the accuracy of Ricks' assessments and ascriptions of responsibility for the earlier mishandling of the war.
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