A military chronicle of the Iraq war is a critical assessment of America's role as viewed from the firsthand perspectives of senior military officers that argues that the guerrilla insurgency that took place in the months after the fall of Saddam Hussein was avoidable and that officers who spoke against the war did so at the cost of their careers. 200,000 first printing.
Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.