Thursday, August 24, 2006
Max Boot reviews Fiasco
Regular readers know that I read Thomas Ricks' book on Iraq, Fiasco, earlier in the month, and reviewed it in installments (part 1, part 2, and part 3). Since writing those posts, I have read a number of other reviews of the book, but no reviewer has come as close as Max Boot to my own opinion.
This is a good book with a bad title. Anyone picking up a volume called Fiasco, with a snarky subtitle referring to "The American Military Adventure in Iraq," might expect another tome from the Michael Moore School of Policy Studies, with its level of analysis restricted to bumper-sticker slogans like "Bush Lied, People Died."
In fact, this is a carefully researched account of the Iraq war by one of America's premier defense correspondents--Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post. His findings of pervasive high-level ineptitude, based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of documents, will be much harder for reflexive defenders of the Bush administration to dismiss than the usual farrago of ideologically motivated accusations from political adversaries.
Boot's review is worth reading in its entirety, as is the book itself. Fiasco does indeed have many flaws (as I wrote in my serial review), but its title really is its greatest shortcoming. Unfortunately, Ricks or his publisher decided that they would prefer to sell a zillion copies to the anti-Bush folks than to the people in the military and the intelligence agencies who should read this book, but will judge it by its cover to be a partisan screed.
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