Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Front Cover
Penguin, 2006 - History - 482 pages
[In this book, the author offers an] account - explosive, shocking, and authoritative - of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq. [The book also offers] accounts of battles such as 2nd Fallujah and Tall Afar, whose names should take their place alongside two Jima and Porkchop Hill on a select list of honor.... Too many American and Iraqi lives have been lost, and too much of America's might and influence has been squandered, for these individuals to escape a fair reckoning. [This book] is that reckoning. -Dust jacket.
 

Contents

A Bad Ending
3
Containment and Its Discontents
12
The Aftermath of 911
35
The War of Words
46
The Runup
58
The Silence of the Lambs
85
Winning a Battle
115
How to Create an Insurgency
151
The Army of the Euphrates Takes Stock
301
The Marine Corps Files a Dissent
311
The Surprise
321
The Price Paid
363
The Corrections
374
Turnover
390
Too Little Too Late?
413
Betting Against History
430

How to Create an Insurgency 11
177
Cant Produce Anything
203
Getting Tough
214
The Descent into Abuse
270
Notes
441
Acknowledgments
463
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post 's senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.

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