Fight club: excessive force nearly lost us the Iraq War. The brass who gave the orders still don't get it.

• Author: Ricks, Thomas E.
• Position: 'Warrior King: The Triumph and Betrayal of an American Commander in Iraq', 'Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story' - Book review

Warrior King: The Triumph and Betrayal of an American Commander in Iraq

by Nathan Sassaman, with Joe Layden

St. Martin's Press, 320 pp.

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Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story

by Ricardo S. Sanchez, with Donald T. Phillips

HarperCollins, 512 pp.

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About eighteen months ago, the U.S. Army produced an important new manual on counterinsurgency that, when implemented last year in Iraq, helped American troops greatly improve the security situation there. Retired lieutenant colonel Nathan Sassaman's recent memoir, Warrior King, is the mirror opposite of that document--it is, effectively, the anti-manual. And it should be required reading for anyone who is deploying to the war in Iraq, or who wants to know how we dug so deep a hole there in 2003 and 2004.

Warrior King is a blueprint for how to lose in Iraq. Of course, that's not how it is presented by Sassaman, who commanded a battalion of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle during the war's first year. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned, neutrally, in the book.) In Sassaman's mind, he's a winner who understood that prevailing in Iraq meant breaking some furniture. A former West Point quarterback, he tended to see the civilian population not as the prize in the war, but as the playing field on which to pound the enemy.

At the heart of this book is Sassaman's conviction that he knew how to win in Iraq, but was surrounded by softies and cowards. In fact, he really only knows one fairly narrow way of war: "My philosophy (and I still think it's sound) was to crush the ant with a sledgehammer." Or, as he memorably put it to the New York Times while he was still in Iraq: "With a healthy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." Officers who disagreed with that, he believed, simply lacked "the will to win."

A lot has changed since Sassaman's time in Iraq. American commanders there have come to focus on the "fence-sitters," the broad middle of the Iraqi population that might be persuaded to support the Americans. Nowadays, U.S. patrols reach out to those people, offering them protection and helping them get essential services such as water, sewer, and electricity. But back in 2003 and 2004 Sassaman was having none of that. In his view, those who were not with him were against him. So when some villages didn't explicitly help his soldiers, he sent loudspeaker trucks to...