Tom Ricks was on MTP Sunday to promote his new book, "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," which explains in detail all the blunders that happened during the Iraq war.
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.
Good news you might think, way to go Ricks. Well, I had to check Billmon to make sure of a few things. There is a new meme going around now since the neocon foreign policy and Iraq war have been a complete and utter failure. Many of those who cheered it on are now taking a 180 degree turn while not mentioning how they once felt.
Billmon explains:
Still, it's instructive, or at least amusing, to take a look back at what Tom Ricks actually reported at the time the Army was allegedly forgetting all those critical lessons of Vietnam. Here's Tom in July 2003, just as the guerrilla war he now says the Army didn't know how to fight was getting started:
As Iraqi fighters launched guerrilla strikes, the U.S. Army adopted a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries and found new ways to gather intelligence about them, according to dozens of soldiers and officers interviewed over the last week . . . At the same time, the frequency of attacks has declined in the area northwest of Baghdad dominated by Iraq's Sunni minority, long a base of support for Hussein . . .That decrease is leading senior commanders here to debate whether the war is nearly over. (emphasis added)...read on
Concluding his interview with Russert, Ricks plan for Iraq now is to stay the course for at least 10-15 years. The Whiskey Bar says: "Well, better late than never, or so they say. So thanks Tom Ricks, for reading all those documents and doing all those interviews and finally telling us the bitter truth -- now that's far too late to do anything about it."
