On Hardball - Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

[RamboLiberal]

Author is supposed to be on according to their email:

Hardball with Chris Matthews tonight will bring you the latest in the continuing Mideast crisis. NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell is traveling with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and was with her on the surprise visit to Beirut this morning. She'll join us with the latest, as will NBC's Mark Potter in Haifa. Also from the region tonight, Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, will be live from Jerusalem.

In political news today, the Connecticut Senate race heats up as former President Bill Clinton campaigns for Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) in Waterbury, CT. NBC's Chip Reid is there this afternoon and will have the latest on the grip and grin.

For the politics of the Mideast crisis and Secretary Rice's unannounced stop in Lebanon this morning, MSNBC Political Analyst Pat Buchanan and Hardball Analyst Bob Shrum will join Chris. They'll also preview President Bush's meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki at the White House tomorrow.

And Thomas Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter and author of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" will discuss his new book on the lead up to the Iraq war.

Hardball Plaza returns this Thursday, with special guest Ann Coulter!

Well I know I'll be tuning out Thursday.

[Justitia]

1. Excuse me, but WTF is Clinton doing meddling in primary politics?

Sorry, off topic, but that pisses me off.

[LiberalPartisan]

5. He's the elder statesman of the party

And he's helping a Great Democrat win a tight race.
Good for Bill & vote for Joe!

[KittyWampus]

10. LOL!

[NNN0LHI]

2. This is the author who thinks we can win in 10 or 15 years I believe? n/t

[RamboLiberal]

3. He thinks we'll be there for 10-15 years

I don't think he necessarily thinks we'll win. He has some inside dope from a lot of senior military on how badly Bushie and the the neocons planned this Fiasco!

[NNN0LHI]

6. Thanks for the clarification n/t

[MissWaverly]

8. we need diplomacy now, I am tired of staying the course

this thing is getting out of control thanks to the neocons

[rodeodance]

4. "Fiasco', like quadmire==is hard for the RW to swallow.

[RamboLiberal]

7. Description of book from Amazon.com

Where thanks probably to a MTP interview it is #4.

The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on the unprecedented candor of key participants.

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated.

There are a number of heroes in Fiasco-inspiring leaders from the highest levels of the Army and Marine hierarchies to the men and women whose skill and bravery led to battlefield success in towns from Fallujah to Tall Afar-but again and again, strategic incoherence rendered tactical success meaningless. There was never any question that the U.S. military would topple Saddam Hussein, but as Fiasco shows there was also never any real thought about what would come next. This blindness has ensured the Iraq war a place in history as nothing less than a fiasco. Fair, vivid, and devastating, Fiasco is a book whose tragic verdict feels definitive.

[Amonester]

11. Who cared what we thought? unfolds Right into a Fiasco...

I'd bet a grand (if I had one) there's not even a single word in there looking anyting close to:

"It's Bush's fault."

And I am more than confident I'd double my bet ...

(otay, ya neva no...)

[RamboLiberal]

9. Kicking cause it's getting close to 7PM for those on the board

And I'm heading out of work. I'm taping Hardball so I can see it when I get home.

"Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" was based on a review of more than 30,000 pages of military documents, several hundred interviews with U.S. military personnel, the author's own articles in The Washington Post, and reporting in The Post and other newspapers.

From its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army's 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units -- the wrong one.

"We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong."

Today, the 4th Infantry and its commander, Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, are best remembered for capturing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, one of the high points of the U.S. occupation. But in the late summer of 2003, as senior U.S. commanders tried to counter the growing insurgency with indiscriminate cordon-and-sweep operations, the 4th Infantry was known for aggressive tactics that may have appeared to pacify the northern Sunni Triangle in the short term but that, according to numerous Army internal reports and interviews with military commanders, alienated large parts of the population.

The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for "grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers unable to figure out who was of value and who was not," according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division's detainee operations by the Army inspector general's office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300495.html

The real war in Iraq -- the one to determine the future of the country -- began on Aug. 7, 2003, when a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy, killing 11 and wounding more than 50.

That bombing came almost exactly four months after the U.S. military thought it had prevailed in Iraq, and it launched the insurgency, the bloody and protracted struggle with guerrilla fighters that has tied down the United States to this day.

There is some evidence that Saddam Hussein's government knew it couldn't win a conventional war, and some captured documents indicate that it may have intended some sort of rear-guard campaign of subversion against occupation. The stockpiling of weapons, distribution of arms caches, the revolutionary roots of the Baathist Party, and the movement of money and people to Syria either before or during the war all indicate some planning for an insurgency.

But there is also strong evidence, based on a review of thousands of military documents and hundreds of interviews with military personnel, that the U.S. approach to pacifying Iraq in the months after the collapse of Hussein helped spur the insurgency and made it bigger and stronger than it might have been.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/22/AR2006072200444.html