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57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
confirms what I feared, August 19, 2006
This review is from: Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (Paperback)
I like James Fallows. I doubt we would be on the same side of the political aisle, but he would not care, and it does not matter. He is more objective than most writers, and I have liked his books since I read his work on national defense years ago.
This book confirms what I have come to fear. The war in Iraq was a huge mistake. It never should have been considered, much less launched. Afghanistan was one thing. It needed to invaded, and the Taliban needed to be kicked out. Maybe its not too late to get it right. Iraq, I fear, is the proverbial quagmire.
There were many in the administration who did not want the damned war. Many in the Pentagon felt the same way. The dismal history of Britain's involvement after WWI should have been a clue. Hubris, on the part of a few, blinded Bush--and others-- in their decision making. The Bush crowd seemed to act like Johnson's wizards getting us into Vietnam.
Perhaps the rapid victory in Afghanistan put the administration on a new high of self-confidence--excessive self-confidence. It appears they rapidly came to see themselves as a winning team, the super warriors--able to overrun a country between lunch and breakfast.
Problem is, they put no thought into what would occur once they had Baghdad. Colin Powell warned Bush. So did others. Its one thing to take a country, another to run it.
I believed there were "weapons of mass destruction." Maybe there were. Maybe they were moved to Syria. If so, the invasion made things worse. Now, the Syrians might have them. If not, being in Baghdad with not enough troops, and the vain hope of democracy taking hold, is pretty thin gruel. Bush got us into it, but God only knows how we will get out. And while we try to find a way out, our military is spread thin, our reputation is wearing away, and the nation is unable to project power elsewhere.
Fallows fills in some gaps. I wondered what happened. Why did Colin Powell bail as Secretary of State after four years? I think I know why. He was ignored. Why did we only hear from a few in the administration? Others were over-ruled, and being quiet. They had Thoreau's feelings of "quiet desperation." They feared the war, and they were right to fear it.
I recommend this book. I WAS a Bush supporter, and I still recommend this book. Fallows writes some pretty stern stuff but its worth reading.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Works Better than It Should, September 8, 2006
This review is from: Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (Paperback)
This book has an unpromising premise: Publish a book based largely on essays that have already been published as articles in the Atlantic Monthly from 2002 through 2005. Despite that, this book ends up working far better than one might expect.
Fallows himself begins by describing the book's perspective (page x):
"The subject of the book is America's preparation for and conduct of its war in Iraq, whose combat phase began in March 2003. because that war played so large a part in the U. S. government response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, assessing the war naturally raises questions about the wisdom, competence, and effectiveness of the overall strategy against Islamic terrorism.
The cumulative argument of the book is that this strategy was gravely flawed in both design and execution."
The chapters cover various aspects of the Iraqi invasion and its aftermath. The chapter entitled "The Fifty-First State?" is based on interviews with knowledgeable players before the invasion of Iraq. The focus was on what was likely to happen after the invasion, since all assumed that the American forces would walk over the Iraqi army. The essay's predictions do not all pan out (and Fallows adds footnotes to note more current information). However, it is interesting to see how a number of these predictions did come to fruition.
Other chapters explore Paul Bremer's terminating the Iraqi Army and his extreme de-Baathification program, how George Bush's original war on terror focusing on Afghanistan began to lose focus with the invasion of Iraq, and so on.
His conclusions are exceedingly harsh and may irritate many readers. He notes, to provide a flavor of his reflections, that (page 229):
"The country failed because individuals who led it failed. They made the wrong choices; they did not learn or listen; they were fools. No one responsible for these errors was dismissed from the administration. No senior officer was relieved or reprimanded."
In the final analysis, because of the approach, some of the material does appear dated. However, this perspective also provides an interesting test of how well (or poorly) Fallows and those people whom he interviewed perceived accurately what the longer term situation would actually be.
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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The ONLY "Before and After" Book on the Iraq Mis-Adventure, October 7, 2006
This review is from: Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq (Paperback)
James Fallows is unique for giving us the only "before and after" book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.
The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.
There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.
James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!
Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the "ruminations of insane people."
The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason--hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.
The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!
The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:
1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.
2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a "free ride" from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy--see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.
3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.
I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.
Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for--none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.
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