I'm about half way through Ricks' book, Fiasco. It's been billed in reviews as the best first history of the Iraqi conflict. It's at least that but it's not so much the older style of historical narrative which focused on this and then that and then this. Rather it's Ricks' interpretation, his argument, that the entire Iraq "adventure", his term, is one of the worst, if not the worst foreign policy mistake in our history. And the consequences are only now being seen.
He does, for instance, the best job I've read of countering the claim that no one could have anticipated these kinds of problems by noting just how widely and how prominently all this was brought into public debate before the invasion. From the difficulties of going in with too few troops to the, at best, thoughtless way of handling the occupation.
One illustration. Each time Jay Garner, the first head of the occupation, tried to bring experienced hands over from the State Department to help plan and organize the occupation, he was told, by Rumsfeld and his lieutenants, he had to use folk from the Pentagon who were "loyal." God help us. |
