http://www.booktv.org/General/index.asp?segid=7346&schedID=439&category=After+Words
But somehow I do not think you will
Posted on 08/28/2006 10:51:04 PM PDT by woofie
The attentive reader of ''Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq'' will quickly run out of yellow ink highlighting all the misjudgments and missteps that, according to the book, have characterized the U.S. invasion and occupation.
The book is a haunting catalog of prescient warnings against invading, inaccurate predictions by Bush administration officials and a few generals, and chronic mistakes in battling an unanticipated insurgency.
Thomas E. Ricks could have filled 300 pages simply by compiling lists of examples. That, however, would not have made for the highly readable and disturbing book he has written.
''Fiasco'' is enlivened by on-the-record, breathtakingly honest critiques from many of the officers and civilian authorities who have actually prosecuted the war. It is further strengthened by the accounts of young soldiers fighting bravely, by Ricks' own reporting on the ground in Iraq and by a strong sense of historical context.
Ricks, the senior Pentagon reporter for The Washington Post, sometimes delves too deeply into insider military culture and jargon. The reader must come to the book with a deep interest in the armed forces, or Iraq, or both. But the reward for finishing the book is a more literate grasp of the events taking place today.
Ricks doesn't pull his punches. A book such as this should have a point of view, yet mainstream journalists who write them often shy away from revealing much of their own opinions. Latest Videos
''Fiasco'' is as pugnacious and provocative throughout the narrative as its title promises. On page 4, discussing the casus belli for a ''pre-emptive war based on false premises,'' Ricks declares, ''Blame must lie foremost with President Bush himself, but his incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story.''
The core argument of ''Fiasco'' is that toppling Saddam Hussein and his government was not particularly significant, and that the United States went into Iraq without a plan for the important part: the postwar occupation. ''The thought was, you didn't need it,'' says Lt. Gen. Joseph K. Kellogg, a senior member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ''The assumption was that everything would be fine after the war, that they'd be happy they got rid of Saddam.''
This assumption had a cascading effect of consequences, none of them helpful, Ricks writes. Ricks says the ''incomplete'' Pentagon blueprint for the invasion was ''perhaps the worst war plan in American history.''
''Because the Pentagon assumed that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that an Iraqi government would be stood up quickly, it didn't plan seriously for less rosy scenarios,'' he says. ''Because it so underestimated the task at hand, it didn't send a well-trained, coherent team of professionals, but rather an odd collection of youthful Republican campaign workers and other novices.'' There were also far too few troops, which hurt the American effort again and again, he says.
Nor did the Americans adapt quickly enough to the insurgency, even as the insurgency swiftly evolved to confront the Americans. One result was mass sweeps for fighting-age Iraqi men, which dumped thousands into detention facilities such as Abu Ghraib. A prison scandal was born, and hatred among a generation of Iraqis was incubating.
Indeed, Ricks devotes two full chapters to U.S. tactics that seemed to fuel the insurgency. An example: disbanding the Iraqi army, which not only obliterated one of the few unifying institutions in deeply splintered Iraq, it also cut hundreds of thousands of Iraqis off from an income.
Yet Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials continued issuing their relentlessly upbeat public assessments of the situation in Iraq, he notes.
Ricks traces the ''real war in Iraq'' -- the beginning of the insurgency -- to August 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian embassy, killing 11 people and wounding more than 50.
The next day, the Coalition Provision Authority, the Bush administration's governing body in Iraq, ''released a public relations document that touted 100 indicators of how well things were going in Iraq,'' Ricks writes.
The CPA document said: ''Most of Iraq is calm and progress on the road to democracy and freedom not experienced in decades continues.''
Today, more than 2,600 American soldiers have died in Iraq since Bush declared the mission accomplished, and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. Deputy Health Minister Adel Muhsin said about 3,500 Iraqis died violently last month nationwide -- the highest monthly tally of the war. The number of roadside bombs directed against U.S. and Iraqi forces also increased sharply last month.
What is driving this violence? Who are the insurgents? Why are they fighting Americans? How many are there? What should the United States be doing? How will we get out?
''Fiasco'' doesn't have the answers, because no one does. Still, the book offers valuable insight into the key people and places shaping a war that is unfolding with no end in sight.
asap contributor Scott Lindlaw is an AP reporter based in San Francisco, where he covers homeland security. He previously was an AP White House reporter.
This is all I can find about Ricks on FR:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1679263/posts
barf alert.
This is the type of person who could disparage the good names of all of those who fought for this nation during WWII. Given enough time and manipulation you could find "stuff" to write any type of trash book.
Did we have a plan to fix Germany when we set about killing Hitler?
There is no way I will read this trash. I won't have to anyway. The rats will be on all of the shows spewing the content as fact.
I never hear any of these "critics" comment on Afghanistan ....The same administratiom and military folks were involved in that war. Was it a success ? If so Why? Was it a failure like iraq is supposed to be? I think the critics like Ricks got some explaining to do
Actually we did. Planning for postwar Occupied Germany began in 1940 (by the British, pretty confident move considering the Blitz was going on). In the US, There was planning done by the War, State and Treasury Departments all through World War II. Though its fair to point out the game plan FDR signed off on in 1944 (the Morgenthau Plan)-- which would have stripped Germany of its industry and left it as sort of a Central European Vermont-- was scrapped at war's end when we saw that we needed a strong Germany (or rather West Germany) to counter the Soviet Bloc.
I imagine Ricks' point in the book is there was postwar occupation planning done, both the State Department and Centcom had been working on it since the 90's, but all that work was scrapped when Bremer rolled in with his crew. Its impossible to say whether things would have gone better with the State Department's original plan.
http://www.booktv.org/General/index.asp?segid=7346&schedID=439&category=After+Words
But somehow I do not think you will
"How in the world they let a flake like this get away with spewing this kind of nonsense.......and no one has the common sense to stand up and cry "Horsesh*t" at the top of their lungs is totally beyond my comprehension.
Thanks. I've watched about the first fifteen minutes of it and have to get ready for an early work day. Depending on the interviewer and interviewee, "After Words" can be excellent or unwatchable. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of this one later today.
Most knowledgeable people felt and still feel that it would take at least five years for things to settle down in Iraq. One main goal, the toppling of Hussein, has been achieved. The other part is much more difficult, and I've never heard any statement from any admin official saying that it would anything other than difficult. Of course no one can predict accurately what would happen after the sacking of Hussein and the subsequent attempt at democratization. It's never been done in an Islamic country before. That doesn't mean it shouldn't have been tried, and Ricks doesn't offer good enough reasons why it shouldn't be. If he thinks that Hussein was not a severe threat to our security, then maybe he should ask Bill Clinton why he thought it fit to pass the Iraq Removal Act in 1998.
I think the terrorists planting roadside bombs and sniping at innocent people are responsible for the violence in Iraq.
What a concept.
This is a great book, if you're interested in some harsh truth. It's easy to dismiss it as an anti-Bush hit piece, but it's simply not. As someone who's set foot on Iraqi soil once or twice (and some other of the GWOTs garden spots), I'm very committed to winning the war on Islamic fascism. I've been a part of it on many levels, and have a pretty broad view of how things are going. That said, we've got to examine our mistakes and fix things, the way we were trained to do, or it's going to be a very, very long war.
So far we've been very hesitant to honestly look at what went wrong, for political reasons, but it's time that we did. There's a reason we're still at this war 3 years later, and it's not because Zarqawi was a modern day Ho Chi Minh. We should have been done with this already, and ready to hold the line against Iran and North Korea by now. The truth of how the occupation was conducted may hurt, but it's time we looked at it.
Let's see. Ricks' book about how the US supposedly was lead by incompetent boobs and screwed up everything sold 55,000 copies.
A book about a guy's Labrador (Marley & Me) has sold over 1,250,000 copies.
People don't care what he had to blovate about.
I saw him interviewed by Russert last Saturday and even with his obvious anti-Bush bias he does raise a whole lot of valid points. And one point he makes is that with all the mistakes made, all the false starts and botched attempts to end the attacks, not a single high level commander has been relieved for their failure. Colonels come in, screw things up, go home, and then a year or two later they're back again as a brigadier general. It isn't that we don't have people who have a clue on how to fight the insurgents, it's just that none of them are running the show.
recognizing my lack of the credentials that you present, doesn't the establishment of a government there that has some hope of gaining the allegiance of the people trump a lot of the horror stories? (see Khalizid WSJ 8/23/06: 94% of Iraquis support a unified state)
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