Iraq: phase one.

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin, 416 pp., $27.95)

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TOM RICKS, who has a keen eye and a depth of contacts in the military, believes the likely outcome in Iraq will be a net loss for America. "There is a small chance the Bush administration's inflexible optimism will be rewarded," he writes, and "a greater chance that Iraq [will offer] a new haven for terrorists."

Ricks builds a devastating case, with a focus exclusively on the military aspects of Iraq. He portrays systemic failures of political-military leadership, of a kind not seen since World War I. The scale is vastly different, of course, but there are undeniable similarities--both in the initial unwillingness to adapt and in the unswerving loyalty accorded to self-assured incompetents. At the end of 2004, President Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to Gen. Tommy Franks and Amb. L. Paul Bremer. Ricks does not mince words about his opinion of those three men: "The U.S.-led invasion was launched recklessly (Bush), with a flawed plan for war (Franks) and a worse approach to occupation (Bremer)."

Ricks's premise is that invading Iraq turned into a military mess that could have been avoided. The first portion of the book addresses the run-up to the war, the swift seizure of Baghdad, and the chaotic aftermath in May 2003. Numerous books and articles have examined this period, and Ricks presents findings similar to theirs: President Bush had Saddam in his sights since 9/11; deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz pushed an idealistic dream of transforming the Middle East by establishing an enlightened democracy in Iraq; the influential Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi was untrustworthy; secretary of state Colin Powell opposed invading but was outmaneuvered; etc. This familiar catalogue is enlivened by a portrayal of Franks, then head of Central Command, as abusive and impatient, "a cunning man, but not a deep thinker," who "ran an extremely unhappy headquarters." Franks, according to the author, had no plan for the occupation, and no intention of remaining the commander responsible for implementing it.

In the middle section of the book, Ricks explains in detail how the U.S. military, once confronted with an insurgency, responded in 2003 and 2004 with sweeps, raids, and arrests that only inflamed the opposition. He lays the blame on three factors. The first was the appointment of Paul Bremer as the president's proconsul. Bremer wielded his wide-ranging powers decisively but not judiciously. His key error was to disband the Iraqi army, a mistake the American military did not appeal to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld to overturn. The second mistake was the appointment by Central Command of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as commander of all U.S. ground forces in Iraq. Sanchez was out of his depth, at loggerheads with Bremer, and incapable of developing a comprehensive campaign plan. This led to the third error: unilateral American offensive operations.

U.S. land forces had fought two successful campaigns in Iraq (in 1991 and April 2003) based on swift, aggressive mounted maneuver. As the insurgency gained steam in late 2003, most of the American divisions in Iraq responded with armored sweeps and cordons. Senior commanders were demanding more "actionable intelligence"--which generated an attitude of "us versus them," resulting in tens of thousands of peremptory searches and thousands of questionable arrests, leading in turn to an overflow at the prisons, to subsequent poor standards, and finally to the disaster at Abu Ghraib.

Ricks indicts what can best be termed the "General Officers" Protective Society." He describes how division commanders inculcated a command climate of aggressive tactics inappropriate to winning the support of the resentful Sunni population. Yet the careers of the generals flourished; all blame was directed at Rumsfeld. Gen. Tony Zinni is quoted time and again, damning the civilians for geopolitical naivete, but Ricks does not let the generals escape criticism: He points out that it was not Rumsfeld but rather the Joint Chiefs and Central Command who dismissed Zinni's operational plans as half-baked.

While Ricks lays into some generals with a verbal broadsword, he compliments some--in particular, Gen. George W. Casey and Lt. Gens. David Petraeus and James Mattis. The last third of the book deals with the faltering steps to implement the counterinsurgency campaign championed by Casey, who took over command in July 2004.

Casey was hampered by two bizarre events. The first was the protective mantle the Shiite leadership cast over the dangerous demagogue Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr had ordered his Shiite militia to revolt in April 2004; when he was cornered, the U.S. high command, importuned by Shiite leaders, let him go free. In August 2004, Sadr revolted a second time. Casey rushed to Najaf as U.S. troops again cornered Sadr; but again the Shiite leadership negotiated his freedom. Today, Sadr is busy creating the equivalent of Hezbollah in Iraq; fresh battles between the Iraqi army and Sadr's militia are inevitable.

The second stumbling block was the imprudent interference of senior U.S. officials that extended and confused the battle for Fallujah. Prior to Casey's arrival, the White House and Bremer could not decide on a consistent course of action toward Fallujah, the stronghold of the insurgency and the lair of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The Marines were first ordered to seize the city, then not to seize it, then to invest it while the insurgents grew stronger. After the August battle against Sadr, Casey turned his attention to Fallujah; a November 2004 assault drove out the jihadists and leveled half the city.

It was not until 2005 that Casey could begin a comprehensive campaign to clear and hold a string of Sunni cities. Ricks points out that this counterinsurgency mission has been slow in gathering momentum. The fastest means of developing an indigenous security force is to embed them with American soldiers, along the lines of the KATUSA program in Korea and the Special Forces A teams and Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam. In 1968, one Marine division combined infantry squads with local militia platoons in more than 80 villages. When the CAP was suggested for Iraq, according to Ricks, a general firmly advised against it--because the squads would suffer casualties.

Iraq marked a sea change in the American way of war. "Force protection" meant minimizing casualties--so that over three years, there were fewer fatalities than in that one awful day of 9/11. Mess halls morphed into "dining facilities" offering salad bars, pizza bars, fast-food counters, Middle East cuisine, or good old-fashioned steak and lobster, followed by ice cream, at a cost of about $34 a meal. Soldiers slept in air-conditioned rooms, chatted on the Internet, and played video games. We chose to fight a war that a veteran of Vietnam would not recognize. (Thrown into the cauldron of Fallujah, though, U.S. soldiers and Marines displayed courage and aggressiveness equal to those of any American generation.)

Somewhere between 1966 and 2006, the conditions of war and the acceptability of misery and friendly casualties had changed. We didn't have enough troops in Iraq partly because of how we chose to fight the war; Ricks blames this on shortcomings in military doctrine, but it may be equally attributable to the current mores of American society.

Like a prosecuting attorney, Ricks weaves together a narrative to make his case, with a focus mainly on 2003 and 2004. He does not attempt to provide a comprehensive history. Indeed, his "Cast of Characters" includes fewer than 70 men. He searched for general trends, rather than for what each division did or did not do. His chief pedagogical technique is to limn a crucial event, contrasting what occurred with what someone said about it later, or recalled saying at the time. Since we are all proficient quarterbacks on Monday, this technique tends to produce paeans such as Band of Brothers after a successful war, or condemnations such as Paths of Glory after a futile war.

Will a new set of authors revise what Ricks has written? I doubt that his view will be seriously challenged. He makes a solid case for each of his indictments.

Ricks introduces the reader to no Iraqis, enemy or friendly, and highlights no interaction between Iraq's politicians and the war effort. Unfortunately, Iraq's political elite has not led; the country's "leaders" have been simply terrible. The fundamental flaw in Iraq, in fact, was not American military missteps but a dearth of Iraqi leadership. The major intelligence failure was the lack of a warning that Iraq had fallen apart as a society. The U.S. military had no doctrine for dealing with the killings between Shiites and Sunnis and the virulence of tribal religiosity. It is hard to win hearts and minds when the Sunni imams are preaching opposition to the infidel crusaders who have brought the accursed Shiites to power, and Shiite militia are hiding behind the Ministry of Interior while killing Sunnis.

Secretary Rumsfeld has said repeatedly that the U.S. military does not do nation-building. He is mistaken. In Iraq, building a nation is exactly what Gen. Casey and his subordinates are trying to do. It is the only way to succeed. The U.S. military has undertaken that staggering task because the rest of the U.S. government did not show up for this war.

If, in the end, Iraq emerges intact and moderate, it will not be because of its political leaders. It will be because the Iraqi army, modeling its behavior to live up to the standards of the American army, is able to defeat both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite militia. Of course there will be all kinds of political deals; and underlying each of them will be the cold calculus of who will prevail in a fight.

While acknowledging that the U.S. military is beginning to get it right, Ricks concludes by asking whether it is too late to head off a low-level civil war that will result in a fragmentation of Iraq equivalent to that of Lebanon in the mid-1980s (or perhaps today). Ricks's pessimism rests on his doubt that America will sustain its effort. That happened in Vietnam after the February 1968 Tet offensive; although battlefield conditions markedly improved over the next two years, attitudes had hardened against the war and against our South Vietnamese allies.

The danger comes when people make up their minds on political grounds and become impervious to facts. Ricks quotes Casey as saying that the average insurgency lasts for nine years. President Bush has 28 months to put Iraq on a trajectory that will be sustained by either a Republican or a Democratic administration.

Throughout Fiasco, Ricks is hard on the U.S. military; but he left me with more hope than he expressed, precisely because he approved of Casey and the other generals now in charge, and because it was, after all, our military that gave him the access, documents, and insights that went into the writing of this book. As both Victor Davis Hanson (Carnage and Culture) and Max Boot (War Made New) have exhaustively documented, the martial superiority of the West is anchored in self-criticism leading to battlefield adaptation.

With the critique offered in Fiasco, Ricks makes a solid contribution to our shared understanding.

Mr. West, who served in the Marine infantry in Vietnam and later as assistant secretary of defense, is the award-winning author of several military histories, including The Village: A Combined Action Platoon in Vietnam and No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. He has been to Iraq nine times, accompanying over 20 battalions on operations.