Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book

"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, drawing on 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.

Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the U.S. military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His newest book, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, is a New York Times bestseller.