Fiasco

Great title for a book about Democracy Boy's adventure in Iraq. Fiasco was written by Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, and there is a review of it in the NY Times today. Reviewer Michiko Kakutani refers to it as a "devastating new book" in which Ricks "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."

From the review:

“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.”

[...]

Mr. Ricks’s narrative is based on hundreds of interviews and more than 37,000 pages of documents, and many of the book’s most scorching assessments of the White House and Pentagon’s conduct of the war come from members of the uniformed military and official military reports.

An after-action review from the Third Infantry Division underscores the Pentagon’s paucity of postwar planning, stating that “there was no guidance for restoring order in Baghdad, creating an interim government, hiring government and essential services employees, and ensuring that the judicial system was operational.” 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.”

[...]

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.”