Uniform disaster: in blowing the Iraq war, Bush and Rumsfeld have had plenty of help--from the generals.

• Author: Galloway, Joseph
• Position: Fiasco - Book review

Fiasco By Thomas E. Ricks The Penguin Press, $27.95

Unless the Visigoths are knocking at your gate and darkness threatens to consume the civilized world, wars are generally a mistake--a confession of a government's failure to find some other way of settling disputes short of sending out 19-year-olds with rifles to kill other 19-year-olds.

And even the most righteous of wars throughout history are riddled with errors large and small, strategic and tactical, that are paid for with the blood of soldiers and civilians. All of it falls under the term "fog of war". The only righteous major war of the 20th century, which consumed some 60 million lives, was rife with bloody mistakes.

Even so, the current and ongoing war in Iraq may yet be written in history as the only war that was a total mistake from beginning to end, where virtually every decision taken both by the civilian leadership, which began it on false pretenses and an overdose of arrogance and ignorance, and the military leadership, which bungled and bumbled and knuckled under, was wrong, wrong, wrong.

When those future historians begin their search for how such a thing could happen, Washington Post veteran military correspondent Tom Ricks's most aptly rifled book Fiasco will be an invaluable starting point. Ricks pulls it all together--how the Bush administration, prodded by its neoconservative handmaidens, took us into an unnecessary war in a tinderbox country and region, and then screwed it up big time.

The dedication of Fiasco is simple: "For the war dead." This is followed by a simple quotation from fourth-century B.C. military strategist Sun Tzu: "Know your enemy, know yourself, one-hundred battles, one-hundred victories."

The confluence of arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence is stunning--and by now familiar to even the most casual consumer of the news. Ricks rightly notes that the fault lies foremost with President Bush, but he declares that "it takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq." The failures were systemic: major lapses within the national-security bureaucracy, from a weak National Security Council to an overweening Pentagon and a confused intelligence apparatus, coupled with the almost complete lack of oversight by Congress and the media.

All of this combined to create a haunting, costly and deadly debacle whose ending has yet to be written three and a half years, 2,550 dead American soldiers, and $300 billion of taxpayer money later.

But what sets Fiasco apart from other histories of the Iraq war is Ricks's account of the inadequacy of the military leadership. Ricks, who interviewed more than a hundred senior military officers and sifted through some 30,000 pages of official documents, is withering: "While the Bush administration--and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Patti Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer III--bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004," he writes, "blame must also rest with the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn't prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counter-productive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counter-insurgency warfare." Ricks notes that in that long, desolate post-Vietnam period when the Army was rebuilding itself, it had deliberately thrown away all the lessons in counter-insurgency warfare learned at so high a price in that bitter decade-long war.

Formal Pentagon consideration of how to attack Iraq began in November of 2001 when, in the wake of 9/11, Under Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz's decade-long, wrong-headed obsession with overthrowing Saddam Hussein gained currency in the administration. Wolfowitz, whose extended family had perished under the Nazis, saw the Iraq conflict as he did most geopolitics, through the prism of the Holocaust. But it was a flawed analogy: as the former head of Central Command (CENTCOM) General Anthony Zinni pointed out, Saddam was less Adolf Hider than Tony Soprano. But to Wolfowitz containment smacked of appeasement. And so the push to persuade the higher-ups to go to war began.

From the outset, there was tension between the uniformed military leadership and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld over two issues: whether to invade Iraq at all and, if so, how many troops...