Customer Reviews

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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I wrote 'Fiasco' and was pleasantly surprised by how well it was done as an audiobook. I actually listened to it on my commute and enjoyed it. I recommend it highly.

I commute 64 miles a day by car and this CD made my commute fly by. The narrator helped me keep all the general straight-- all of whom were saying in one way or another: "This isn't going to work" or "What is Plan B once Plan A fails?". I sat in my office driveway listening to "Fiasco"!
I highly recomend it..........now I need to buy something else.....or wait for Tom Ricks to write a follow-up.

What a shame. This book gives a good outline of the events of the war and what happens when politics, not military know how runs a war.

This was a very informative read for me.

However, I disagreed with the war from the onset as did many of my friends who are also Vietnam veterans.

I think this book is excellent and you'll find it immensely informative if you believe the Iraq war was wrong. If you believe the war was an absolute must in the war on terrorism, you'll see the book as more propaganda from the Liberal Left.

If you're a White Republican Male over 50 I would recommend NOT buying it.

This book provides a good analysis of some of the mistakes the U.S. made in the war in Iraq. I would classify the problems he describes into two main mistakes. First, the Bush administration imagined that WWII is a good analogy for the threat that the U.S. faces from the mideast. That wouldn't have been a particularly unusual problem in a war if they had corrected their worldview when they saw evidence of enemies using a very different strategy.
The biggest and least excusable problem was that the lack of anything clear enough to be called a military strategy. It almost sounds like Bush thought the sound bites used to market the invasion to voters amounted to an adequate description of military goals. This left various parts of the U.S. forces pursuing conflicting strategies that ranged from attempts to aid Iraqis in building a democracy to attempts to conquer Iraq for its Al-Qaeda connections, leaving U.S. forces to a confused pursuit of conflicting strategies that guaranteed increased Iraqi hostility toward the U.S. without accomplishing much else.
This book suffers somewhat from a narrow scope and an over-reliance on opinions from within the U.S. military. Ricks and his sources seem to be too optimistic that they've learned a strategy that has some chance of working if U.S. voters are patient enough, but they show no familiarity with the analysis in Robert Pape's book Dying to Win which suggests that the strategy advocated in Fiasco will perpetuate the conditions under which suicide bombings increase.
The book implies that a sufficiently wise set of leaders could have produced a strategy with a reasonable chance of success, but I'm left doubting that any U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein could have produced a good result.
The book is mostly cautious about historical events that the author can't verify, such as Bush's motives, and the extent to which U.S. policy was manipulated by Iran.
I'm curious why Fiasco doesn't devote much attention to the current Iraqi government. Possibly it is sufficiently tainted by its association with the U.S. that it is irrelevant, but if so I would have expected an argument to that effect.