The Iraq ‘Fiasco’

One of the several unintentionally humorous moments involving President Bush at the recent G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg was when Bush suggested to Vladimir Putin that he pursue a course of democracy in Russia "just like in Iraq".  That remark was the source of much laughter from Putin and everyone else who was there.  For Putin and the world know that Iraq is anything but a model democracy: rather it is Bush’s Fiasco.

Thomas E. Ricks, the senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, has written the best overview so far of the Iraq debacle, based on hundreds of interviews, numerous visits to Iraq, and a review of 37,000 pages of documents. His assessment is pretty devastating:

“President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy. The consequences of his choice won’t be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information — about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda’s terrorism — and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock.”  (Ricks, Fiasco)

For those who want a taste of the book, I recommend these two articles from the Washington Post, which were adapted from Fiasco:

• In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam
• ‘It Looked Weird and Felt Wrong’