Edward Nawotka: Silence of 'lambs' exposed

Publishers are releasing an unprecedented number of books that cast a critical eye on the US-led intervention in Iraq. The most scathing critique yet comes from Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post.

In Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin Press), he writes that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 "ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy". Not only was it "based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history", but it "confused removing Iraq's regime with the far more difficult task of changing the entire country".

Though Ricks covers some of the same ground as earlier books, this account - based on hundreds of interviews and the review of 37,000 documents - is insightful on the origins of the deadly insurgency and failure of the reconstruction.

Ricks argues that US policies and tactics, especially Paul Bremer's de-Baathification order and disbanding of the Iraqi army - which put half a million armed and skilled men out of work - provided the insurgency with all the capable recruits it would ever need.

Congress is rebuked for being too passive: "In previous wars, Congress had been populated by hawks and doves," Ricks writes. Now "it seemed to consist mainly of lambs who hardly made a peep". In a chapter entitled "The Corrections", journalists, including former Times correspondent Judith Miller, are held equally accountable.

One of the few journalists Ricks praises is James Fallows of the Atlantic magazine, a publication, Ricks says, that did an "exemplary job in posing the right questions about Iraq both before and after the invasion".

Five of Fallows' essays on the war have been collected in Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq(Vintage)

Fallows' work is notable for its prescience. He counters then-Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's assertion that Saddam Hussein's regime was equal to that of Hitler's during the Holocaust, and thus necessitated intervention. Instead, Fallows posits World War I as the better analogy, because it is "relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination, specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war".

Wolfowitz also argued that invasion would be cheap. In Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Little, Brown), author T. Christian Miller, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, points out that just a week after the March 2003 invasion, Wolfowitz told a group of congressmen: "There's a lot of money to pay for this.We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon."

Initially in 2003, the Bush Administration budgeted US$2.3 billion ($3.6 billion) for the reconstruction. Since the invasion, the US has spent more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq.

Miller uncovers escalating tales of thievery: US officials and soldiers who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars that they used to buy Cadillac Escalades and Breitling watches; a private security company guilty of $3 million in fraud and an Iraqi arms broker's scheme to skim as much as $2 billion intended to buy new weapons for the Iraqi security forces.

Young British diplomat Rory Stewart experienced the frustration of working in the postwar reconstruction firsthand. In The Prince of the Marshes and Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (Harcourt) he offers an unflinching chronicle of the 11 months in 2003 and 2004 during which he served as provisional and deputy governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces in southern Iraq.

Just 30 years old when he went to Iraq, Stewart already had plenty of experience in the Muslim world: in 2002, he hiked across Afghanistan (an experience he documented in The Places in Between).

In Iraq, he finds the system is broken. Stewart mocks Paul Bremer's seven-point plan for Iraq as "seven steps to heaven".

Despite this cynicism, he resolves to re-establish a political system representing every Iraqi affiliation, Islamist and insurgent alike. Like a contemporary George Orwell, Stewart delivers a harrowing series of episodes, starting with the threats by a local tribal strongman - the prince of the title - and ending with the fear of being blown to pieces by an unappreciative populace.

In contrast, Babylon by Bus by slacker frat-boys Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann (Penguin Press) is decidedly less serious. It details their picaresque misadventures while working for the Coalition Provisional Authorityin Baghdad, and distributing clothes in the Sadr City slum.

"If we were the good news from Iraq, the CPA had a problem," they write. They came, they helped, they partied. And when it looked like they faced kidnapping or death, they left.

* Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.