'Fiasco' or 'Debacle' by any other name

At the Wilson County Public Library a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a book I'd been wanting to read for several years but had never gotten around to. Part of the problem was I kept getting the title wrong: I kept thinking "Debacle," but the title of Tom Ricks' 2006 book is "Fiasco." It's an apt title for his thorough history of American errors in the Iraq War.

Ricks' analysis of all the things that went wrong — and almost everything went wrong or was based on false assumptions — is devastating. From the initial decision to launch the invasion, based on the mistaken belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that he was tied to the 9/11 attacks, to the failure to secure weapons caches that later supplied the insurgency, to the failure to plan for post-invasion governance, the Bush administration misjudged and mismanaged everything.

In one sense, the history of the early years of the Iraq War, which is still not over (we still have 100,000-plus troops there), is a Greek tragedy. Hubris, that personality flaw that drives so many Greek tragedies, is evident aplenty in this history. The neo-conservatives in the Bush administration were so absolutely certain that they knew what was best for Iraqis and how Iraqis would react to an invasion that they never considered what might happen if Iraqis did not welcome invaders with open arms or if the toppling of Saddam's regime resulted in anarchic chaos. The planners of this war apparently never considered the impact of sectarian hatred or the absence of any history of democratic institutions. The key players in this tragedy — Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle — stubbornly stuck to their preconceived notions of how this adventure should end, despite the devolution in other directions.

The invasion of Iraq has been called the worst foreign policy mistake in American history, and Ricks' book does nothing to rebut that assertion. In fact, his history of this debacle, revealing the short-sighted assumptions and the failures to face reality, adds support to that accusation.

I've read that Ricks' follow-up book, "The Gamble," is kinder toward the Bush administration. "The Gamble" reports on Bush's decision to order a "surge" in troop strength in 2007 — a reversal of the 2003 doctrine to use minimal manpower — which succeeded in dramatically improving security in Iraq and making possible national elections and, it is hoped, the withdrawal of American troops. If "The Gamble" is as thorough, revealing, interesting and well-written as "Fiasco," it also will be worth a read.