Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq

James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent, produced a series of articles between 2002 and 2005 on the planning and execution of the war against Iraq. He has now brought these articles together in a fascinating book. He writes, "the administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against." Bush refused to use the State Department's `Future of Iraq' programme. He was told that occupying Iraq would be harder than conquering it, that they should act to prevent looting, and that they should not disband the Iraqi army. But he ignored all this good advice, because planning for postwar meant facing its costs and problems, which would have weakened his fragile case for war. Fallows writes that the US strategy against Islamic terrorism is `gravely flawed in both design and execution'. He points out that Bush's mantra of "they hate us because we are free" is "dangerous claptrap. Dangerous because it is so lazily self-justifying and self-deluding: the only thing we could possibly be doing wrong is being so excellent." Fallows also recounts what happened when a team of experienced US government officials war-gamed attacking Iran. They explored three escalating levels of intervention: raids on Revolutionary Guard units (which Brown has apparently signed us up to), a preemptive strike on possible nuclear facilities (an estimated 300 targets, in a five-day assault), and regime change. They concluded, "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work." Fallows sums up, "The country failed because individuals who led it failed. They made the wrong choices; they did not learn or listen; they were fools." The war in Iraq is counter-productive: the USA is now worse off than in 2003. It is also unwinnable: as a US lieutenant colonel said, there are now "two options. We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose." Fallows concludes that the US state should "face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly."

Blind into Baghdad is all the more impressive for the fact that nearly all of the content was researched, written, and published as events were unfolding. The book loses nothing for being an anthology of previously published articles, and it gains much force from that circumstance. The writing is clear and readable. Occasional footnotes update specific points. For those who do not have the time or energy to read the whole array of books on the Iraq war, Blind into Baghdad may be the one best book to select from that array.

This book was painful to read. Not because of any shortcoming of the writing, but because the analysis was so accurate. There's no argument that George W. Bush is an intellectually uncurious person. "Blind into Baghdad" exposes the problems with his character flaw. The president has surrounded himself with yes-men who, like him, were either unwilling or unable to confront tough questions and myriad uncertainties during the time leading to the war in Iraq. Instead, the administration operated with an appalling hubris and made decisions that will likely influence the international community for decades. Fallows deftly examines how the administration blithely ignored pre-war alerts concerning insufficient troop levels, red flags about possible post-war rioting, and military logistical problems. In addition, the vindictive nature of the administration is also evident as Fallows shows how those people raising hard questions about the war were swiftly scuttled. Finally, the author then gives an excellent analysis of how Bush and company completely fumbled the post-combat operations period when it started to become clear that the administration hadn't done its homework. This book is not recommended for those with cardiac or circulatory troubles because it will definitely angry the blood.

James Fallows is unique for giving us the only "before and after" book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost. The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole. There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it. James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on! Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the "ruminations of insane people." The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason--hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge. The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it! The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders: 1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more m

Only one thing puzzles me about James Fallows: why is he not considered among our most important American journalists? The respected Bob Woodward rightly caused a national sensation with the publication of "State of Denial." Yet, those of us who have been faithfully reading Fallows' reporting in The Atlantic Monthly were made aware of this Administration's predispositions since late 2003 - the year of the Iraqi invasion. It is not news to Fallows' readers that George W. Bush's inner circle chose to overlook facts and cautious warnings from the Government's top professionals - Pentagon war planners and State Department veterans whose responsibility was to provide our elected leaders with the best information possible. In the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic, Fallows wrote: "All the government working groups concluded that occupying Iraq would be far more difficult that defeating it. [Paul] Wolfowitz either didn't notice this evidence or chose to disbelieve it." These statements are among the many damning - but now widely known and accepted - facts that Fallows brought to light in the early going. Keep your eye on the work of James Fallows. He asks the right questions of the right people long before it becomes the popular thing to do.