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Fiasco: The AmericanMilitary Adventure in Iraq. By Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. 482 pages. $27.95. Reviewed by Richard Halloran, onetime lieutenant of airborne infantry and a former military correspondent of The New York Times.
By the time this review appears, the book titled "Fiasco" by Thomas Ricks, a military correspondent for The Washington Post, will have taken a welldeserved place on the lengthening shelf of excellent critiques on the war in Iraq. The author wastes no time in setting his pen to cut a wide swath throughWashington and Baghdad, beginning with President George W. Bush. Ricks asserts in his opening passage that the president's "incompetence and arrogance are only part of the story."
Ricks goes on to slash Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the Republican-dominated Congress.He cuts an equally wide swath through the US civilian and military high command and their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad. Since this and other accounts have extensively recorded the triumphs and failures of Iraq, there would seem to be little left to say.
Ah, but don't go away. There is a subtext to Fiasco, a thread on militarypress relations coursing through the copy that has been little noted in the attention to the larger picture. Ricks, in response to an e-mailed query, says that this thread was not deliberate but "just kind of happened" as he toiled on the manuscript. Here, too, the author's double-edged electronic sword slices into the military leadership and the press with equal fervor. Few on either side survive without deep...