Fiasco was a very illuminating book, but was also very frustrating. Illuminating because Ricks details exactly how and why the U.S. went wrong in prosecuting the war in Iraq. Frustrating because he supports his narrative mostly with interviews rather than data.
The central tenet of Ricks reporting is that the U.S. military treated the Iraq conflict tactically as a conventional war, when in reality the strategy needed to be that of counter-insurgency. Faulty political assumptions by civilian leaders such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld started everything off. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and there wasn’t a unified Iraqi population ready to accept our soldiers as liberators. Militarily nearly every leader got it wrong. Some were simply incompetent, particularly L. Paul Bremer, in charge of the pseudo-military Coalition Provisional Authority (C.P.A.), the nominally civilian temporary occupational government. In addition, infighting between branches of the military and the C.P.A. hampered effectiveness (particularly when all sides were wrong).
I was a lukewarm supporter of the Iraq invasion in 2003. I thought using the U.S. military there was moral for the same reasons I supported Bosnian intervention. Removing a brutal dictator to prevent massive civilian deaths is fine in my book. I was lukewarm because I didn’t believe the weapons claims by the Bush administration, nor did I think the timing was right.
As the war progressed and spiraled out of control, I often wondered what the hell was going wrong. We seemed to change our political plans every six months. The constant spew of feel-good rhetoric from the administration pissed me off. Most frightening was that it seemed like we had no permanent successes. I had lots of scenarios running through my head that I thought would be better than what I saw. After reading Fiasco, I’m pretty sure most of my ideas wouldn’t have worked. But then, neither did most of the ideas tried by the army.
The book is really depressing. With a title like Fiasco that’s pretty much guaranteed. The biggest reason though is that the same mistakes are repeated over and over and over again. Overwhelming force. Round up civilians. Disrespect the populace. Wash, rinse, repeat.
One big thing that frustrated me about Fiasco is that Ricks focused so heavily on narrative
, or telling a story. He was a reporter for the Washington Post, part of the main stream media. A media that overly focuses on narrative. In other words, the reporter constructs a story that fits what he sees and tells that. When I’d rather the paper just tell me what it is they see.
As an example, one of the main arguments Ricks makes is that we went in with too few troops to occupy a country. In only one spot does Fiasco cover what adequate troop levels might look like. He does that when he reports what appears to be back-of-the-envelope calculations done by General Eric Shinseki. Fiasco doesn’t provide a timeline of the troop levels we did use either. Scattered here and there are mentions of troop levels, but only when they fit the narrative.
The problem with narrative is that I have no way to tell if it’s the correct narrative. It seems to make sense. His method of creating that narrative is to have lots and lots of interviews. But I can’t go to those people to check, and I can’t be sure they didn’t create the narrative for Ricks themselves out of whole cloth. Without data I don’t know.
The narrative (story) is good though. In a depressing way.
A few other blogged reviews:
Title: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Cover creator: Alex Majoli (photographer) / Darren Haggar (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 492 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-303891-7
Subject: Iraq war, 2003-
Subject: United States — History, military — 21st century
LC classification: DS79.76.R535 2006
[...] read Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco earlier this year. That was all about the invasion and bungling of the war in Iraq. He has a new [...]