A Bigger Fiasco Than Imagined

The book Fiasco by Thomas Ricks has been a fascinating read: It is a book that I am comfortable discussing having not finished. This is, of course, a rarity. I feel as though I know the ending already for we are living with it now. The ending is uncertainty and pessimism in Iraq – a country whose indigenous problems were made far worse by our occupation

If you haven’t read it you should. It’s an extremely well researched narrative account of the Iraq War. His use of evidence is thorough and impressive. Ricks gives us first hand accounts from grunts sitting in Bradley fighting vehicles in the same paragraph as high-minded war theory from historians and generals. He shows, through lurid detail, the political infighting of the Bush administration and how it directly affected what would become the quagmire in Iraq. It is an anti-war book written, it feels, reluctantly by someone who is a veteran war correspondent and one of the few people who “gets” the difference between a worthwhile strategic campaign and a campaign of folly. It is also a deeply patriotic text in the best sense of the word – here is an author that cares for the soldiers going through hell. He cares so much he’s trying to explain the inexplicable.

There are three things in this book that have struck me the most. First, after September 11, the invasion of Iraq was inevitable. The administration’s war caucus was dead set on it and congress was too self-centered to stop them. Second, that the War as reported by the media, is now and has been for three years, far worse than has been reported, not better, as claimed by the administration. Third, the President has been completely removed from the major decisions of the war, and according to Ricks, hasn’t been “in the loop” from the beginning.

First, the lead up to war: Officials at the DOD were intent on making this war a reality and were able to convince the SECDEF and the President of its inevitability with relative ease and without the intelligence to back it up. This is not new information, but it is absolutely astonishing how the worst-case scenario, that there was a conspiracy within the administration to mislead the public, actually worked with complete ease and without resistance. Congress was negligent, the president uncurious, and the nation full of wrath from 9-11, enough to buy the cock-and-bull story being pitched.

Second, the situation in Iraq is far more brutal and far more of a “hot” combat zone than the media has portrayed. Troops have been engaging in daily combat operations against a guerrilla force there since May 2003. That’s three years of constant combat operations against an insurgent force made up of humiliated and disenchanted young men who are nationalists, not just religious fundamentalists. It has long been the insistence of the Bush administration that the media was only portraying the bad things that happen in Iraq, never the good. This is a fallacy. The media is only giving us a small slice of what is, and has been for years, a hot combat zone and an actual War – not just isolated skirmishing and random attacks. Had the American people seen exactly what was going on over there in the summer of 2004, as well as been shown the repeated mistakes of this administration’s war policy, I suspect Bush wouldn’t be in office today.

This brings me to the third revelation – that of executive distance to the point of incompetence. When a nation goes to war we expect the Commander in Chief to be personally engaged with the cause, strategy, and eventually, the implementation of that strategy on the battlefield. In Fiasco, we don’ see much of the president at all. Unlike Lincoln or FDR, this president is comfortable taking the information he is being given and the recommendations of flawed men at face value. This is simply astonishing especially from a man who claims to care so much about what these men are going through.