'Fiasco' From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong

[FreeStateDemocrat]

'Fiasco'

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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 25, 2006
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.

FIASCO
The American Military Adventure in Iraq
By Thomas E. Ricks

482 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.


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.

“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,” Mr. Ricks writes. “The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. 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.”

-snip-

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.”

This was partly a byproduct of the Pollyannaish optimism of hawks like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who slapped down the estimate by the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, that several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure Iraq. And it was partly a byproduct of a conviction shared by Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks that speed, in Mr. Ricks’s words, “could be substituted for mass in military operations.” (cont'd)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/books/25kaku.html

[C_U_L8R]

1. Bush not only fought the WRONG WAR

but he got EVERYTHING WRONG about it...

what a freekin' dog's breakfast !!!

[Redstone]

2. Fiasco. It's the perfect word.

Redstone

[Bozita]

3. “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”

A well done review.

from the book review:

And an end-of-tour report by a colonel assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority memorably summarized his office’s work as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.”