Selected Product:
| Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005
Paperback
Edition: 1st
Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Release Date: 2007-07-31
ISBN-10: 0143038915
ISBN-13: 9780143038917
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating:
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The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
ISBN-10: 1400030846
ISBN-13: 9781400030842
List Price:$15.95
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Vintage)
ISBN-10: 0307278832
ISBN-13: 9780307278838
List Price:$14.95
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
ISBN-10: 030734682X
ISBN-13: 9780307346827
List Price:$14.95
Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
ISBN-10: 1400075394
ISBN-13: 9781400075393
List Price:$16.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
The definitive account of the American military’s tragic experience in Iraq from a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter
Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, puts forth in Fiasco a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, now with a preface on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel—including more than one hundred senior officers—and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America’s most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.
Despite All the Planning, Rumsfeld Had No Plan
| Customer Rating:  | Mr. Ricks argues that the invasion of Iraq "was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history," an incomplete plan that confused removing Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country.
The result of going in with too few troops and no larger strategic plan, he says, was that the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d'état more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.
The four hundred plus pages move along pretty fast and Ricks to his credit, lets the facts tell the story without extensive or heavy-handed direct criticism of President Bush or then-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.
I think Fiasco along with Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)are the two best books about the Iraq war to date. Recommended. |
Fantastic
| Customer Rating: | | What a book. The true behind the scenes revelation of how and why the Iraq war happened. No BS just the facts. |
Pleasantly Surprised
| Customer Rating: | | Since 2003, the people who had negative thoughts about Iraq were usually the people who were not very well informed. Although this book holds a more liberal point of view, the technique that Ricks' uses in his countless interviews with everyone from Privates to 4 Star Generals was amazing. He rarely inserts his own opinion in the book and lets the information speak for itself...so that the reader can either disagree or agree with the information presented to him/her. This is a great read for anyone who is interested in the war in Iraq, anyone who loves military reading, or anyone who is being deployed to Iraq. It holds a lot of good information on why we have been failing over there and what we can do to better our chances of stopping the insurgency. Great read, I strongly recommend it. |
The story of an incredible American folly
| Customer Rating: | Amazing that such a book could be written about a war that is still going on. The existence of this book, if not its horrifying contents, have given me back some faith in the freedom we are (or should be) fighting for.
Clearly the recent "surge" that has brought about such a significant reduction in violence in Iraq is based upon all the costly lessons the Americans learned in the first four calamitous years of the Iraq War, as set out in this book. It would be a terrible waste if all those gains were to be lost by US domestic political opportunism, which might pull the troops out too soon. The Americans already lost one war they had already won on the ground (Vietnam) due to misguided domestic pressures, I hope they don't do it again. |
Best Documentation of Iraq War to date
| Customer Rating: | | No, I have not been to Iraq in any capacity, but this book has an intensely real feeling to it. Unlike "Cobra II" which rambles a bit and tends to focus in on the details of battle too much (that is still a good book to read), "Fiasco" can be devoured in one sitting by the reader, giving them a bird's eye view of the whole mess that feels very real, and will fill in a lot of the blanks for Americans who had been relying on the media for an idea of what is going on over there. |
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