Inside the green zone: a former CPA advisor details just how dysfunctional the Iraq occupation was.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: On Political Books - Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq - Book Review

Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq By Larry Diamond Times Books, $29.50

In various Washington watering holes this summer, one of the favorite topics of dyspeptic discussion among conservative think tankers and political operatives was this book by Larry Diamond, which presented a scathing critique of the Bush administration's mismanagement of post-invasion Iraq. Yes, they admitted, Diamond was hand-picked by Condoleezza Rice for duty as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, but didn't he work in the Clinton administration? Sure, he spent time on the ground in Baghdad, but only for a brief period, right? And true, he hangs his hat at the Hoover Institution, but y'know, that place just isn't as reliably conservative as it used to be.

Larry Diamond's conservative critics would have done well to pay attention to his book instead of indulging the urge to delegitimize any critics of Bush policies. Indeed, it's this tendency to ignore expert advice and the lessons of history that got the administration into so much trouble in Iraq in the first place.

Diamond's actual tenure in Iraq as an advisor to CPA's vice regal director, Paul Bremer, lasted from January to April of 2004. But it involved him directly in the painful and ultimately unsatisfactory effort to write a temporary constitution for Iraq, and ended just as a two-pronged insurgency flared up in the Sunni Triangle and in Shi'a areas of Baghdad and South Central Iraq. And it positioned Diamond to make an informed assessment of the serious mistakes made in Washington and in Baghdad before and during his service to the CPA.

As the book's title, Squandered Victory, indicates, Diamond's list of mistakes is extensive and devastating. And to a remarkable extent, most of them are traceable to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top civilian staff, and to the extraordinary power President Bush gave them for planning both the invasion and the post-war governance of Iraq.

Among Rumsfeld's many mistakes, says Diamond, two stand out. First, his insistence on going into Iraq with roughly one-third of the forces that virtually every military and civilian expert deemed necessary to secure the country after Saddam's regime collapsed. Second was his willful rejection of such post-war planning as was available, especially from the State Department, on grounds that the only transition plan necessary was to turn the country...