Book Review
by Daniel O’Rourke • Cassadaga, NY

FIASCO
The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas E. Ricks
www.penguin.com

It’s 9-11 and I have just listened to President Bush speaking to the nation on television. He used the solemnity of the occasion and the prestige of the oval office to exploit the pain and sorrow of this tragedy for his party’s political purposes. Once again the President has confused the war on terror with the war in Iraq. For self-serving reasons he would have us confuse them also, but he is mixing apples with oranges.
Ironically, I’ve been reading Thomas Ricks’ bestseller on the Iraq War. He called his book FIASCO. That gives you an idea where he’s coming from, but Ricks is no radical peacenik. He’s the Washington Posts’ senior Pentagon correspondent and has covered the military since 2000. His scholarly book runs over four hundred pages even without its notes and index. Future historians attempting to understand the war in Iraq will be studying it. I sense he’s writing for them and not for the pundits pontificating on the up-coming congressional elections. The President would do well to read it.

FIASCO’s dedication jarred me. It is simple and startling. It reads, “For the war dead.” No qualifications, no distinctions -- no divisions by nationality, gender or military status. “For the war dead” i.e. for Americans and Iraqis, for men and women, for soldiers and civilians.

I won’t cite statistics; we know them. They are the dreadful, horrific price of this military misadventure, which the President is urging us to continue at any cost. Despite spins by generals safe in their Baghdad green zone, the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. The soldiers and marines call it FUBAR: Fouled-Up-(the printable version)-Beyond-All-Recognition. There has been a litany of inept miscalculations and ham-fisted decisions, which the President is loath to acknowledge. The list is long: the false claims of weapons of mass destruction, the unfounded pre-war linking of Iraq with Al Qaida, the deployment of insufficient troops, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the absence of post-war planning, the torture of prisoners, the lack of armor and equipment for our military. Ricks dissects all this dispassionately without political bias. The President glosses over it.

The Bush administration barged into Iraq with little understanding of its culture, its mores or its religious differences. Basically that has been our undoing. Ricks quotes Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese military strategist. “Know your enemy, know yourself, One hundred battles, one hundred victories.” We did not know our “enemy” nor did we really know ourselves. For that we have no “victory” and never will. We should have stayed in Afghanistan and pursued bin Laden. That’s the war on terror.

The administration shudders at using the words, but Iraq has devolved into a Shiite-Sunni civil war. To admit that, of course, would be to acknowledge failure. When our troops leave Iraq, what will they leave behind? A partitioned nation with a fascist theocracy in the Shiite south, a ground base for Al Qaida in Sunni land and an even more independent Kurdistan? No matter how it spins out, the last state will be worse than the first. The insight of Martin Luther King is prophetic. "Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows."

To the rest of the world this administration appears incompetent. It’s the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Ricks wouldn’t put it that way. He’s too scholarly, nuanced and restrained. But the neocons and the President in his 9-11 talk continue to shoot wildly. Ricks and the President look at Iraq and see different landscapes. Ricks’ book is a reasoned and dispassionate study; the President’s view is an ideological fantasy.

I have great compassion for our troops bogged down in this tar pit. Yet the President is asking them to continue to die for his mistakes. Their lives are being destroyed in various ways. Death and physical injury are not the only weapons of human destruction. Psychological scars, nightmares, suicides, divorces also destroy life and its quality. I wish this administration was as concerned about human life in Iraq as the life of frozen embryos in stem cell research.

Donald Rumsfeld recently compared critics of the Iraq war to World War II Nazi appeasers -- such as English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Even for political rhetoric that’s a low blow. As Mark Shields asked sarcastically on the PBS News Hour, what does that make Bush? Winston Churchill? If so where are “the blood, sweat, toil and tears?” Unlike Churchill, Bush has not asked any painful sacrifices from ordinary citizens. He hasn’t in the past and he didn’t in his fifth anniversary 9-11 talk.

A more accurate World War II comparison would be the current administration and Joseph Goebbles’ propaganda ministry. It was the Nazi Goebbles who famously said, “If you tell the people a lie over and over again, they will eventually believe it.” Essentially that’s what Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney are doing. Implicitly and explicitly, again and again despite clear evidence to the contrary they link the war on terror to the war in Iraq. Shamefully, the President did it again in what should have been a compassionate talk to a still grieving nation. Originally he confused Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein; now he confuses guerrilla terrorists and Sunni insurgents.

No matter what the President reads to the nation from Carl Rove’s teleprompter, Thomas Ricks is correct; Iraq is a FIASCO. Our soldiers and marines are also right: it’s FUBAR.

Daniel O’Rourke is a Member of the Federation of Christian Ministries and CORPUS. He’s a married Catholic priest, retired from the administration at State University College, Fredonia and a mediator for the Center for Resolution and Justice. Comments may be sent to orourke@netsync.net