Sunday's Book World section in the Washington Post features a review by Brookings Institution fellow Daniel Byman of the new book by Post reporter Thomas Ricks, titled Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq. The review is headlined "The March of Folly: A damning new book by a Post Pentagon reporter shows how Iraq fell into chaos." Byman seemed to be writing to get himself into the dust-cover hoorah blurbs:
In his compelling and well-researched book, Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, painfully but clearly reveals an important truth about the Iraq debacle: It has a thousand fathers.
As the title implies, Fiasco pulls no punches. Sure enough, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith come off badly in Ricks's account. But so do most Democratic members of Congress (whom Ricks labels not doves but "lambs" for their failure to oversee the executive branch) and the media, particularly the New York Times, which failed miserably to probe the Bush administration's war justifications and postwar planning. Ricks is also particularly scathing toward L. Paul Bremer, who led the civilian occupation authority in Iraq in 2003-04. Ricks quotes one colonel who described the efforts of Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority as "pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck."
So Tom Ricks isn't a garden-variety liberal reporter, but a pushy progressive, raining fire on liberal Democrats who voted for the war and on his liberal colleagues at the New York Times, who've spent the last several years apologizing for themselves as if they were Donald Rumsfeld rah-rah boys before the war. (Please consult the actual reporting before you buy that.)
