9-12-06, 9:25 am

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E Ricks Penguin Group, 2006

THIS big book on the US-led occupation of Iraq is written by the Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, who, until the end of 1999, covered the US military for the Wall Street Journal.

Ricks has reported on US military activities all over the world. The present volume relies partly on a steady stream of emails from soldiers in the field.

We get what we might expect. This is a weighty chronology of journalese which charts the catastrophic US arrogance and brutality that destroyed a country.

Ricks is quite clear about it all. The US decision 'to invade Iraq may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy.' And the 'incompetence' and 'arrogance' do not just belong to George W Bush. Ricks notes that 'it takes more than one person to make a mess as big as Iraq.'

We are reminded of Operation Desert Fox, the 1998 onslaught on Iraq, when 415 cruise missiles - more than the 317 employed in the entire 1991 Gulf war - were fired at a defenceless nation along with strikes by 600 bombs. We are told that the Bush administration had no plan for the post-war situation, but, here, perhaps Ricks might have mentioned the Future of Iraq Project, which is described by David Phillips in his insider book Losing Iraq. The US government had access to post-war plans, but chose to ignore them.

Even the US commander in 1991 Norman Schwarzkopf was wondering what would happen to Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

We are also reminded of the useless 'intelligence' provided by unreliable sources, the response of German foreign minister Joschka Fischer to US propaganda - 'Excuse me, I am not convinced' - the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the battles over Fallujah, the short-sighted de-Ba'athification campaign, the deliberate killing of civilians and much else.

The US military soon learnt that it was all going wrong. When Ricks quotes retired Marine General Anthony Zinni saying in regret at the deteriorating situation: 'We could have done some great things,' I am reminded of the old gangster in Godfather II talking with Michael Corleone. The great things that the US occupiers were aiming at in Iraq were pillage and extermination.

There are few deviations in this detailed narrative, but one is of particular interest. British Lieutenant General Aylmer Haldane, who suppressed the Iraqi uprising of 1920, wrote in The Insurrection in Mesopotamia: 'We lived on the edge of a precipice where the least slip might have led to a catastrophe.'

The Bush administration, ignorant of Iraq, has learned nothing from history, except that it is a good idea to muzzle the press if you want public opinion to support a genocidal war thousands of miles away.

Even then, with the body bags coming home in ever-increasing numbers, the dim US public will eventually perceive that things are not going well.

If the book has any fault, it is to ignore the fundamental legal and ethical aspects of the war. He criticises incompetence, arrogance, tensions between the Pentagon and the Coalition Provisional Authority and the appalling brutalities of US troops.

But this all suggests that, if soldiers would only behave better and their masters would only think more clearly, then everything would work out for the best. Perhaps Ricks is only denouncing a stupid imperialism. I am not at all sure that he would condemn one that he thought was intelligent.