On Friday 1 September 2006 Thomas E Ricks will discuss his new book ''FIASCO: The American Military Adventure in Iraq".
Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.
‘The front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid the chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions...' Five years after 9/11, we are in the fourth year of war in Iraq, with much uncertainty ahead for the US and British forces there. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent at the Washington Post, has had exceptional access to commanders inside the US military, intelligence officers, army doctors and ordinary soldiers, on and off the record. In FIASCO, Ricks contradicts the official stories and figures, and gives a chilling picture of the deceit, stupidity, wishful thinking, lack of forward planning and total intellectual failure of those behind the invasion. The result is an extraordinary new insight into the plight of the ordinary soldiers doing nightmarish jobs, and the real nature of the fighting in Iraq.
This meeting will take place at the IISS, Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, WC2R 3DX and begin at 2pm.
Please notify Caitlin Brannan at
brannan@iiss.org or tel. +44 (0)20 7395 9119 if you would like to attend. 
