Fiasco

The vacuum did not stay empty for long. In the weeks after Baghdad fell, Iraq came apart in ways the occupiers had not prepared for. Government ministries were looted down to the wiring. Ammunition dumps across the country sat unguarded, and Iraqis carried away the explosives that would later be packed into the roadside bombs killing American soldiers. Ricks records that commanders on the ground begged for orders to stop the chaos and were told, in essence, that it was untidy but not their job. Rumsfeld's response to the looting — "stuff happens" — became a small monument to the mood at the top.

Into this disorder came the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer, and with it two decisions Ricks treats as catastrophic. In May 2003, Bremer issued an order dissolving the Iraqi army — some four hundred thousand men, most of them armed, suddenly unemployed and humiliated. Days earlier he had ordered a sweeping de-Baathification, purging tens of thousands of civil servants, teachers, and engineers because they had held party cards required to keep their jobs under Saddam.

By the second half of 2003, soldiers were dying to bombs and ambushes, yet the official language stayed frozen. The attackers were "dead-enders," "bitter-enders," remnants, criminals — anything but an insurgency, because to admit an insurgency was to admit the war was not won. Ricks shows how this denial at the top shaped behavior at the bottom. Units trained and equipped to fight a conventional enemy applied conventional force to a problem that demanded restraint, and every heavy hand created new recruits for the fight they refused to name.

The response to attacks was too often mass detention and aggressive sweeps. Soldiers cordoned off towns, kicked in doors at night, and hauled away military-age men on thin suspicion, sometimes in front of their families. Thousands ended up in overcrowded prisons like Abu Ghraib, many of them innocent, all of them radicalized by the experience. Ricks argues this was counterinsurgency run in reverse: instead of separating the population from the fighters, the tactics drove them together.

Step back from the individual blunders and Fiasco becomes a book about a deeper mismatch: between an army magnificently built to win wars and the entirely different discipline that winning a peace requires. The American military of 2003 was the most powerful the world had ever seen at destroying an enemy. It was almost untrained at the thing occupation actually demands — patience, restraint, cultural knowledge, the willingness to accept risk in order to protect a population rather than crush it. The very qualities that made the invasion swift made the occupation clumsy.

Ricks's argument is that counterinsurgency is counterintuitive to a conventional force at every level. The instinct under fire is to answer force with more force, to protect your own with overwhelming firepower. In a war among the people, that instinct is often exactly wrong — every civilian killed, every innocent man detained, produces more enemies than it removes. The occupation kept reaching for the tool it knew, the sledgehammer, on a problem that called for a scalpel, because the sledgehammer was what it had been trained and equipped to swing.

The banner said Mission Accomplished, and for the kind of war the American military understood, it nearly was. Saddam was gone within weeks; the conventional enemy never stood a chance. But the occupation that followed answered a fight it refused to recognize with tactics that widened it, dissolved the institutions that might have held the country together, and produced, month by month, the very insurgency its leaders kept insisting did not exist. Ricks's title is not rhetoric. It is a diagnosis, drawn from the soldiers and officers who lived it, of a war lost not on the ground but in the assumptions carried into it.