Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

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.