Review
Apparently, T.E. Lawrence once compared putting down a guerrilla
insurgency to attempting to eat soup with a knife - a slow and messy process.
This view reflects the opinion of the majority of those interviewed for
Fiasco
- the Iraq War is not only a slow, messy process but one that could and should have been avoided. Ricks reports that many in the military now publicly acknowledge that the guerilla
insurgency that exploded after Saddam's fall was not preordained, and, in fact
was created by the war's architects - but those who tried to speak out against
the miscalculations and shortsightedness at the time were generally crushed,
their careers ended.
What makes
Fiasco stand out from the crowd of recently published books
about the current situation is the comprehensiveness and coherence of Ricks's reporting, and the dozens of military sources...
Beyond the Book
Thomas E. Ricks has been The Washington Post's senior Pentagon
correspondent since 2000. Until the end
of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a
reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for
national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia,
Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
He is the author of
Making the Corps and
A Soldier's Duty.
Between 2003 and 2006 he made five trips to Iraq. He says that on his
first trip in April/May 2003 he could walk the streets of Baghdad at night,
albeit with caution; even in the summer of 2003 he felt safe driving to Tikrit,
but "to do either of those things now [2006] would be...
