Annual political book award.

FIASCO BY THOMAS E. RICKS 

When future historians want to "know what went wrong in the first years of America's occupation of Iraq, they will doubtlessly turn to Tom Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. And when journalism professors assign books of great war reporting to their students, we hope Ricks's book will be one of them. The Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize--winning senior Pentagon correspondent not only traveled with soldiers on the ground in Iraq, but tapped the sources, up and down the chain of command, that he'd developed during his twenty-three years of reporting on the military. For his research, Ricks combed through more than 30,000 pages of documents and dozens of books, but most importantly he relied on the unexpurgated e-mails, letters, and notes from American military personnel, many of whom were outraged at the conduct of the war. Ricks reveals that in the crucial early months of the occupation, senior civilian and military leaders refused to admit--despite the evidence in front of them--that they were fighting an insurgency. Indeed, Ricks shows that the U.S. military had flailed over many decades to incorporate into its doctrine and practices the hard-won counterinsurgency lessons of Vietnam. It was, says Ricks, "... as if the Army washed its hands of the entire experience and essentially concluded that it was never going to do anything like that again." Ricks's writing is clear, measured, and free from bombast--and will, without a doubt, inspire outrage in any reader who cares about America.