As a consequence of this royal screw-up, "the U.S. military would fight hard and well but blindly, and the noble sacrifices of soldiers would be undercut by the lack of thoughtful leadership and the top that soberly assesses the realities of the situation and constructed a response." [p. 129] Ricks is undoubtedly correct when he asserts: "Ultimately, however, the fault for the lapse in the planning must lie with Rumsfeld." [Ibid]
Inside Rumsfeld's steel-trap mind was the conviction that Iraq could be defeated and pacified with a ridiculously low number of soldiers. It was the "mother" of all the Bush administration's donkey mistakes, coming in slightly ahead of Bremmer's two disastrous decisions, the disbanding of Iraq's army and the de-Baathification of Iraq's society.
Ricks quotes an unnamed active-duty general who concluded: "Tactically, we were fine. Operationally, usually we were okay. Strategically - we were a basket case." [p. 308] And that's the beauty of Rick's exceptionally informed book. He allows the brave American soldiers to describe the hellish, no win, situation that the Bush administration donkeys [punks] placed them in.
Or take, for example, the Bush administration official who claimed that "Feith ought to be drawn, quartered and hung...He's a sonofabitch who agitated for war in Iraq, but once the decision is made to do it, he disengages. [Note: Feith was nominally responsible for planning the post-invasion occupation. For more information on Feith's role in offering up bogus inflammatory intelligence about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, see my article, "Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office," the CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda at http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/reviews/gestapo.html ]
Moreover, Fiasco is an exemplary case study of civil-military relations under the Bush administration. As such, and assuming it receives the wide readership it deserves, Americans will find a new frame of reference to aid them when attempting to decide which congressional candidate(s) should get their vote this upcoming November.
Armed by the information in Fiasco, Americans will get a sense of the passion with which many of America's senior military leaders (both active and retired) opposed both the very reasons for invading Iraq as well as the (now demonstrably crackpot) strategy to be employed there. And they've been vindicated on both counts. (This reader felt compelled to contemplate how close America came to a coup d'etat.)
In addition, voters armed by the information contained in Fiasco will be able to ask their incumbent candidates:
(1) Did they vote in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq? And, if yes, were they one of the mere handful of incumbents who actually read all 92 classified pages of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD before voting in favor of war?
(2) Did they stand up for America's soldiers, when their senior officers, especially in the Army, so presciently opposed both the very reasons for invading Iraq as well as Rumsfeld's crackpot strategy? Or did they support the donkeys that ordered America's lions into their self-generated quagmire?
Although the prospect of a coup was always remote and morally problematic, the prospects for regime change in America now seem quite promising. And, thanks to Thomas Ricks, Fiasco might advance that cause by demonstrating to voters precisely how Bush administration donkeys [punks] betrayed America's military lions in Iraq. His book sheds fresh light on the subject of "supporting the troops."
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