Annual political book award.

• Position: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq - Brief article - Book review

FIASCO BY THOMAS E. RICKS

When future historians want to "know what went wrong in the first years of America's occupation of Iraq, they will doubtlessly turn to Tom Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. And when journalism professors assign books of great war reporting to their students, we hope Ricks's book will be one of them. The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize--winning senior Pentagon correspondent not only traveled with soldiers on the ground in Iraq, but tapped the sources, up and down the chain of command, that he'd developed during his twenty-three years of reporting on the military. For his research, Ricks combed through more than 30,000 pages of documents and dozens of books, but most importantly he relied on the unexpurgated e-mails, letters, and notes from American military personnel, many of whom were outraged at the conduct of...