Anatomy of a fiasco

I haven't read Tom Ricks' book, "Fiasco", so I don't really know whether it should be #1 on the Wall Street Journal list or not. I do know that, based on this transcript from a Michael Krasny radio program (courtesy of Brad DeLong), he has some interesting things to say about the war in Iraq. Mostly, Ricks blasts Congress and the military; Congress because it has looked the other way, the military because it has not analyzed its actions. He goes back to a fundamental principle of sound management: frequent self-examination. Both the military and Congress never did question what was happening. Nor did they have the interest in understanding Iraqis, a violation of another basic management principle: understand your market.

Ricks finds it odd that no general has been removed in this war, whereas in most of our previous wars we did replace generals who were not getting the job done. Ricks saves his sharpest criticism for Franks, recipient of the Medal of Freedom. In Ricks' view, Franks' "war plan helped create the insurgency" due to a total misreading of the situation so that there was no follow-up plan after Iraq had fallen.

Paul Bremer, another Medal of Freadom winner, is blasted for his dismantling of the Iraqi army, another aid for the insurgency. Note that this dismantling occurred after we had been dropping leaflets for years in Iraq; the leaflets said that they should not fight us, we would take care of them. Well, we did. We fired them and gave them a reason to join the insurgency.

Ricks feels that we need to stay in Iraq, but we should cut the number of soldiers to 50,000 or so and use the money saved (about$1.5 billion a week) to give the Iraqi military the training they need to defend their country, rather than their sect.

Ricks comes back again and again to the need to see reality. For example, in the military's view the Green Zone is secure if there are no deaths. Such a premise leaves out the daily thefts, rapes, assaults, intimidation that goes on and makes life hell even for those Iraqis living in the Green Zone.

Another of Ricks' themes is how this war is unlike WW II. Instead of uniting the nation by enlisting the aid of all parties, our leaders seem intent on winning the argument and, in fact, seldom countenancing an argument. Instead of supplying enough troops to help restore order and security to Iraq, we've hired mercenaries, whose job is not to win the peace but to ensure that they get paid.

I don't think I'll read the book. I'm depressed enough.