Journalism is history's first draft , and Thomas Ricks explores in exacting detail the errors in planning, judgement, and strategy that lead to America's misadventure in Iraq. From the beginning, the war was hampered by poor analogies, cherry-picked intelligence, and an division at the highest levels of the Pentagon. There is more than enough blame to go around; Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Franks, Powell, etc, but if any person is truly to blame, it's Rumsfeld, who sabotaged effective planning for the occupation, failed the military, and failed the American people. L Paul Bremer, as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, deserves another large helping of blame, but an effective plan would have never put him and the CPA's unending stream of short-term contractors in charge to begin with.

The most killing indictment of the Bush administration's plan for war is that there was a very real chance that the war could have been won in 2004 or 2005. Saddam was crushed, the insurgency weak, the Iraqi people desperate for real change. But because the Bush administration was focused on non-existent WMDs, and didn't provide a real strategy for reconstruction, they gave the insurgency time to organize and to fight. The bloody peak of the conflict in 2005-2007 is entirely due to failures in the opening days of the war. Military boldness is often to be commended, but with the Bush team, lead instead to a quagmire, and an expanded civil war which has cost millions of lives, incited hatred for Americans, and trained our enemies in the hard school of insurgency.

If there's any weakness to this book, it's that it was published in 2006, and so doesn't cover the surge and General Petraeus's successful counter-insurgency strategy. But you can't fairly blame a book for not being prescient. "The Gamble" is Ricks' sequel, and has been added to the pile.