Finally finished Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks, just in time to call it one of my books of the year. (It was published in hardback last year, so it's officially one of the books of last year, but I read it in paperback this year, so fuck off. I rarely read books in hardback, so my books of the year are always books of last year. Ain't it always the way?) Thomas E Ricks is an American journalist with a sound CV of military reporting behind him - he's currently senior Pentagon correspondent at the Washington Post. This book, dedicated to "the war dead" is an exhaustive account of the occupation of Iraq up to mid-2006. It actually begins with George H W Bush's decision not to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991, but concentrates on his idiot son's reign after September 11, 2001, when "everything changed." Ricks constructs his narrative from testimony of everybody from the top down in the US military, quoting emails home from disillusioned grunts and memos sent between departments at the White House and Pentagon. If there is a villain of the piece, it's not George W Bush. He barely features, beyond unconvincingly cheerleading at press conferences and assuring the media that Iraq was going really well. This is not his war.


It's Rumsfeld's war - as set out in even more embarrassing details in Rumsfeld: An American Disaster by Andrew Cockburn, which I've also read and, hey, came out this year! Assisted by Tommy Franks, who certainly aimed to please his masters, if nothing else, it was Rumsfled who underestimated troop numbers, consistently failed to address post-invasion policy (which is why there wasn't one), and overruled the State Department, parachuting in loyal Republicans with no direct experience in the Middle East to help run the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer, who also comes out of all this as a prize dick. So many mistakes were made through sheer arrogance: the failure to seal the border with Syria, through which sympathetic fighters poured when the great public order vaccuum was created; the failure to stop looting after the fall of Saddam, which decimated the infrastructure in Baghdad; the break-up of the Iraqi army (something Bremer seemingly ordered without direct say-so from anyone in Washington), causing further unemployment and fuelling the insurgency; the "de-Baathification" of Baghdad, which left the occupiers with only a few surviving Iraqi ministers to play with, despite the fact that under Saddam, many civil servants joined the Baath party because they had no choice and were not necessarily pro-Saddam fanatics; it goes on. As indeed does the occupation, way beyond the end of this book.

You come out of the other end of it not hating the military. How can you, when they are doing the job that is handed down to them? Certain commanders in certain areas of Iraq did a good job of dealing sympathetically with the locals and attempting to build bridges with them, but this good work was so often undone by a new regiment (with different tactics) taking over the same patch. Although Abu Ghraib is the cornerstone own-goal of the whole sorry mess - the flashpoint at which public opinion, even in flag-waving America, turned against the occupation - the impression given is that it really was a few bad apples on the ground. It would be wrong to imagine that all US troops in Iraq were idiot, hotheaded, frankly homoerotic racists. (It still amazes me that servicewomen were involved in prisoner abuse - and have no real defence as to why they either got involved with those awful photos, or stood by while others did. Just goes to show: you shouldn't have preconceptions, good or bad, based on gender.)


I'm now reading Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the much-admired book specifically about life inside the Green Zone, where a little America was recreated for those working in the CPA's inner sanctum. This book really brings alive what Ricks constructs through testimony. I realise I am obsessed with the Iraq war, or that must be the impression given. In a way, I am. After September 11, I really resisted the received wisdom that "the world had changed" that day. I resisted it because it seemed like a convenient, wound-licking western media concept, but as time has passed, I've come to realise that, sadly, the world did change. Because when American foreign policy changes, or is allowed to change, the whole world changes with it, such is that country's imperial power. Thus, the occupation of Iraq - botched, bloody, almost humorous in its surreal uselessness - becomes the key event of our times. Global security spreads out from the Middle East, and has done since 1991, when the US struck its bases in Saudi Arabia, and the likes of Osama bin Laden found a new focus for their war against the infidel. The rest is history, as they say.

Interestingly, I was stopped and searched today at the train station by police acting in accordance with our very own Prevention Of Terrorism Act. The stop was courteous and the search pretty flimsy - they looked in my bag, that's all - but it still involved my name, address and date of birth being taken down by an officer of the law, which made me feel indignant, to say the least. They gave me a leaflet, which I read on a bench as I waited for my train. Luckily, I got to the bit that said, "If you are stopped and searched you are entitled to a copy of the form, which is completed at the time of the stop." So I went back to the officer and asked for this. She was again courteous, and finished filling it in, so that she could give me my copy. In the reasons for stopping me, she had entered a section of the Act, mentioned that I was heading on a train into London, and that I was "also carrying a black holdall." This makes me a terrorist suspect. Before September 11, 2001, I don't think it would have. So well done, everybody. The other figure who barely gets a mention in Fiasco, the most complete history of the Iraq war, is Mr Tony Blair, who made anyone with a bag going to London a terrorist suspect with his puppy-dog enthusiasm for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld project. What a shame his legacy goes pretty much unmentioned.

Jay Garner, first "viceroy" of Baghdad, replaced by the hapless Bremer, reported back to Rumsfeld and told him what he - a man on the shop floor - felt had gone wrong. Rumsfeld couldn't care less, saying, "Well, we are where we are, there's no need to discuss it." It was, by the way, retired Marine general Anthony Zinni, former chief, US Central Command, who provided the quote I have used for the headline. Try getting anyone at the Pentagon to nod sagely at that.

These faraway blunders affect us all. (Except: are they really blunders? It's convenient to think of the Bush administration as idiots, but they're not, are they? I just can't see, having read this and the other books on the subject, how the current mess can benefit them? It may even lose the Republicans the 2008 election, and that's no good, is it? Fiasco and Rumsfeld and Emerald City don't comment on the motives of the Bush administration. That's for raving nutters to speculate upon. But they don't paint a pretty picture, and they're Americans.)

Labels: al-qaeda, books, iraq, terrorism, war