Books & Poetry

‘Illegal’ and ‘immoral’ are the adjectives  used most often to describe the Iraq War; ‘unnecessary’ and ‘incompetent’ would be more precise. Ricks’s coruscating analysis of the conflict, ‘Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq’, follows George Packer’s ‘The Assassins’ Gate’ and Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s ‘Cobra II’ in offering examples of official arrogance and stupidity on every page.   

Packer was a liberal hawk who needed to believe the war would work despite all evidence to the contrary. Ricks is more at ease in his anger (perhaps because his paper, the Washington Post, toed the line to the point of propaganda), so his denunciations lack the angsty crackle that made ‘The Assassins’ Gate’ such a terrific read. Ricks also lacks Packer’s gift for narrative and wide-angle approach, but makes up for it with hard contacts, which he uses to emphasise that the mistakes and inventions that undermined the occupation directly fostered the insurgency and were anticipated by critical experts before the invasion.

Like ‘Cobra II’, Ricks is big on strategy (‘the worst war plan in American history’) and execution, but he covers the insurgency and occupation in greater detail than Gordon and Trainor. And unlike Packer, Ricks is not impressed by the intellectuals behind the war – one soldier sarcastically dismisses Paul Wolfowitz as‘crack-smoking stupid’ – let alone Donald Rumsfeld, the pantomime villain in all three books. Ricks’s speciality, though, is getting inside the military mentality, and we learn much about the Army, from tactics and weapons to language, including a fondess for acronyms (SWAGS – scientific wild-assed guesses) or the ‘verbal tic of the US military that officers tend to say challenge when they mean problem’. There were a lot of challenges in Iraq.