Washington Post correspondent Tom Ricks isn’t afraid to place blame when it comes to the Iraq War.

‘You don’t get a mess as big as Iraq through the failures of a few individuals,’ Ricks told a Syracuse University audience Thursday evening. ‘You really need a systemic breakdown. So what was that breakdown?’

Ricks, who has covered the Pentagon for 24 years and won the Pulitzer Prize for his work in 2000, is the author of ‘Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.’ ‘Fiasco’ in his words discusses ‘what happened in Iraq over the last three years, how it happened and why it happened.’

‘I wrote it because I had to, which is the only good reason to write a book,’ he said. ‘I wrote the book to try to figure out the answer to the questions that were bothering me.’

‘It is masterful reporting, a journalistic tour-de-force’ Charlotte Grimes, Knight chair in political reporting at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, told the hundreds of professors, students and Syracuse community members who filled Maxwell Auditorium Thursday evening to hear Ricks’ thoughts and predictions about the war.

The speech was followed by a question and answer session with Ricks, joined by College of Law professor William Banks and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs professor Al Roberts.

Ricks gave a grim assessment for the future as well as biting criticism of the decisions that led up to the war. He stressed that there are no easy solutions and predicted the United States will be dealing with Iraq for years to come, regardless of the plan of action.

‘The more you look at it, the clearer it becomes that the Iraq war is a bigger problem for the U.S. than the Vietnam War was,’ he said in the somber tone he used through much of the speech.

As for the cause of what he called ‘the worst war plan in American history’ in the first place, Ricks attributed it to five major institutional failures: the Bush administration, the Intelligence community, journalism, Congress and the military establishment.

Bush administration

Ricks singled out two major problems with Bush administration policy in Iraq: The reversal of the traditional Middle Eastern foreign policy of seeking stability at all costs and its exclusionary practices.

‘After 9/11,’ Ricks said. ‘U.S. policy in the Middle East was no longer about pursuing stability. Stability, rather than being the goal, became the target.’

And rather than try to incorporate other countries into the discussion, Ricks said, the Bush administration listened to few others.

‘This was a departure from the American tradition of the Big Tent – bringing people in,’ he said.

Even the advice of expert military generals was ignored, he said.

‘Again and again, people who raised questions were treated as dissenters,’ he said. ‘And dissent was viewed as disloyalty.’

Intelligence community

Though the politicization of intelligence agencies is inevitable, Ricks said, in this war, it has been far more extreme. The effect of this in Ricks’ opinion is that the intelligence community didn’t present an honest representation of the situation to the American leadership.

‘I don’t blame this on the people who did the front-line analysis,’ he said. ‘From what I have read, it was actually quite good, quite accurate and quite astute.’

But as the information went up the bureaucracy, it was perverted, he said.

‘Anything that tended to support the Bush administration’s views was emphasized. Anything that tended to undercut the Bush administration’s views was downplayed or excluded all together.’

Ricks singled out the destruction of Colin Powell’s political career as one of the major effects. Powell, he said, was given information for his February 2003 speech to the United Nations that is now known to be almost entirely false.

‘Among other things this is an extraordinary way to treat a man who has given decades of his life to public service,’ he said. ‘They basically played him like a fool, treated him like a child.’

Journalism

Journalism as an institution failed to gain an interest or a response from the public, Ricks said.

‘The American people were not interested. The American Congress was not interested. And I was beating my head against a wall for a year publishing these stories, and it was like throwing pennies into an endlessly deep cliff. No response,’ he said.

Even stories with alarming information were ignored by editors and the public alike, he said.

‘At its best, we had stories on page A23 that we should have had on page one,’ he said

But Ricks did not simply blame the public. He cited journalists such as New York Times reporter Judith Miller as adding to the public hysteria that led to war.

‘Journalism absolutely failed and helped accelerate the drive to war,’ he said.

Congress

In Ricks’ opinion, Congress basically gave the Bush administration a blank check in Iraq.

He criticized what he called the complete collapse of congressional oversight.

‘In other wars, we had hawks and doves,’ he said. ‘In this war, we had silence of the lambs.’

Military establishment

Ricks said the military failure was quite simple: The troops were not adequately prepared for the mission.

‘Our generals took our troops unprepared for the tasks at hand,’ he said. ‘The result of this is troops were given missions that were basically undoable.’

Ricks shared first-hand experience from time he spent embedded with U.S. troops. He emphasized he does not blame individual soldiers.

At the very beginning of his speech, he thanked the handful of Iraq veterans in the audience and led a rousing round of applause in their honor.

Rather, he placed the fault on the higher-ups in the military.

‘I don’t blame the soldiers,’ he said. ‘I do blame the people who put them there.’

Looking forward

Despite promises, a new president will offer no immediate solution either, Ricks said.

‘This is really no longer George Bush’s problem,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think a new president is going to get us out any time soon.’

In his conclusion, Ricks offered little hope for a positive ending.

‘This will not end well. I think the best way to think of Iraq is as a tragedy,’ he said somberly. ‘Keep in mind that Shakespeare’s tragedies have five acts, and I fear we are only in Act Three.’

Published on September 20, 2007 at 12:00 pm