Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (review)

Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq should be considered an essential addition to the expanding list of works published on the current conflict. Whatever the outcome of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, Fiasco should prove highly useful given its wealth of perceptive insights from the world of policymakers to the soldier on the front lines. Should the U.S. prove successful, Fiasco should serve as the initial volume about a war that was begun on the basis of wildly inaccurate expectations, unrealistic assumptions, a multitude of initial missteps, and incompetence balanced by a (yet to occur) remarkable turnaround. If the U.S. ultimately fails in Iraq (or achieves something in between utter failure and success), Fiasco will still serve as a highly relevant work for its discussions about the importance of planning for the post-conflict phase of operations as well as for lessons on how not to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

Fiasco is broken down into three sections: "Containment," "Into Iraq," and "The Long Term." "Containment" reviews the period from the end of the Gulf War in 1991 to just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The first section casts into relief two key personalities with widely differing views on the wisdom of invading Iraq, General Anthony Zinni and Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Paul Wolfowitz; the unrecognized success of Operation Desert Fox in 1999; and the multitude of prewar factors that contributed to the emergence of a virulent insurgency in the months following the occupation. "Into Iraq" covers the actual invasion and carries on through the emergence of the Abu Ghraib scandal (roughly February-December 2005). Particularly interesting aspects of this section are the emergence of a sophisticated insurgency, the inadequacy of the U.S. response, and the factors that contributed to the scandal over prisoner abuse. The final section, "The Long Term" covers the period from 2004 to mid-2006. The final section looks at U.S. steps to regain the initiative and examines the possible outcomes, including a worthwhile discussion of the U.S. experience in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

The U.S. experience in Vietnam has been referred to as the "wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong army," and one cannot help but be struck by the relevance of this phrase with regard to Iraq. While Ricks's description of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 reiterated U.S. mastery of conventional ground warfare, the Army's lack of institutional focus and shortcomings in leadership, doctrine, and training for counterinsurgency could not have become more evident. While it seems clear that insufficient ground forces and the lack of focus on ensuring postwar security contributed greatly to the rise of the insurgency, Ricks accurately notes that the Army was ill-prepared for counterinsurgency; a type of conflict dismissed by the Army after Vietnam as institutionally unimportant and the province of Special Forces.

Ricks describes Fiasco as a work of narrative history and while it reads like an extended Washington Post column and lacks footnotes, his sources are well discussed in the lengthy notes section. The numerous interviews with personnel and access to thousands of documents produced by the military during the conflict give the work an unusual level of detail and authenticity. Not surprisingly, there are several areas that could have received greater attention. The view of events in Iraq from Washington is insufficiently examined, in particular the role of the White House and National Security Council in managing the Iraq effort. The lack of integration of the political, military, and reconstruction efforts in Iraq, a significant factor in the failure to establish security or develop a coherent strategy to confront the insurgency, deserved greater scrutiny. Greater effort could have been made to examine the roles and contribution of coalition partners, as well as to provide more in-depth analysis of the insurgents.

The critical tone...