Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005

Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The best account yet of the entire war. --Vanity Fair

The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq

Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account--explosive, shocking, and authoritative--of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.