2005, ISBN: 9780143038917

Gebundene Ausgabe

Simon & Schuster. Good. Paperback. 1995. 928 pages. Cover worn<br>With a new Introduction by the author, t he twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning epi… Mehr…

Simon & Schuster. Good. Paperback. 1995. 928 pages. Cover worn<br>With a new Introduction by the author, t he twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic about how the atomic bomb came to be. In rich, human, poli tical, and scientific detail, here is the complete story of the n uclear bomb. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly?or h ave been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nu clear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of h ardly more than twenty-five years. What began merely as an intere sting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Proj ect, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scie ntists known only to their peers?Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bo hr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann?stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. Richard Rhodes takes us on tha t journey step-by-step, minute by minute, and gives us the defini tive story of manÂ's most awesome discovery and invention. The Ma king of the Atomic Bomb is at once a narrative tour de force and a document as powerful as its subject. Editorial Reviews Amazon .com Review If the first 270 pages of this book had been publishe d separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beaut ifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and wom en who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the followin g 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ul timate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concep ts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made t he discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the fir st half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; bot h men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant ph ysicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Bo ok Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the centur y contributed to the greatest destructive force in history. Abou t the Author Richard Rhodes is a widely published author. His art icles have appeared in numerous national magazines. He graduated from Yale University and has received fellowships from the Ford F oundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Gu ggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapt er 1 Moonshine In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight t o change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, S eptember 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain wo uld begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story l ater he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destinat ion intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped o ff the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before hi m and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all ou r woe, the shape of things to come. Leo Szilard, the Hungarian theoretical physicist, born of Jewish heritage in Budapest on Feb ruary 11, 1898, was thirty-five years old in 1933. At five feet, six inches he was not tall even for the day. Nor was he yet the s hort fat man, round-faced and potbellied, his eyes shining with i ntelligence and wit and as generous with his ideas as a Maori chi ef with his wives, that the French biologist Jacques Monod met in a later year. Midway between trim youth and portly middle age, S zilard had thick, curly, dark hair and an animated face with full lips, flat cheekbones and dark brown eyes. In photographs he sti ll chose to look soulful. He had reason. His deepest ambition, mo re profound even than his commitment to science, was somehow to s ave the world. The Shape of Things to Come was H. G. Wells' new novel, just published, reviewed with avuncular warmth in The Tim es on September 1. Mr. Wells' newest 'dream of the future' is its own brilliant justification, The Times praised, obscurely. The v isionary English novelist was one among Szilard's network of infl uential acquaintances, a network he assembled by plating his arti culate intelligence with the purest brass. In 1928, in Berlin, where he was a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin and a con fidant and partner in practical invention of Albert Einstein, Szi lard had read Wells' tract The Open Conspiracy. The Open Conspira cy was to be a public collusion of science-minded industrialists and financiers to establish a world republic. Thus to save the wo rld. Szilard appropriated Wells' term and used it off and on for the rest of his life. More to the point, he traveled to London in 1929 to meet Wells and bid for the Central European rights to hi s books. Given Szilard's ambition he would certainly have discuss ed much more than publishing rights. But the meeting prompted no immediate further connection. He had not yet encountered the most appealing orphan among Wells' Dickensian crowd of tales. Szila rd's past prepared him for his revelation on Southampton Row. He was the son of a civil engineer. His mother was loving and he was well provided for. I knew languages because we had governesses a t home, first in order to learn German and second in order to lea rn French. He was sort of a mascot to classmates at his Gymnasium , the University of Budapest's famous Minta. When I was young, he told an audience once, I had two great interests in life; one wa s physics and the other politics. He remembers informing his awed classmates, at the beginning of the Great War, when he was sixte en, how the fortunes of nations should go, based on his precociou s weighing of the belligerents' relative political strength: I said to them at the time that I did of course not know who would win the war, but I did know how the war ought to end. It ought to end by the defeat of the central powers, that is the Austro-Hung arian monarchy and Germany, and also end by the defeat of Russia. I said I couldn't quite see how this could happen, since they we re fighting on opposite sides, but I said that this was really wh at ought to happen. In retrospect I find it difficult to understa nd how at the age of sixteen and without any direct knowledge of countries other than Hungary, I was able to make this statement. He seems to have assembled his essential identity by sixteen. H e believed his clarity of judgment peaked then, never to increase further; it perhaps even declined. His sixteenth year was the first year of a war that would shatter the political and legal ag reements of an age. That coincidence -- or catalyst -- by itself could turn a young man messianic. To the end of his life he made dull men uncomfortable and vain men mad. He graduated from the Minta in 1916, taking the Eötvös Prize, the Hungarian national pr ize in mathematics, and considered his further education. He was interested in physics but there was no career in physics in Hunga ry. If he studied physics he could become at best a high school t eacher. He thought of studying chemistry, which might be useful l ater when he picked up physics, but that wasn't likely either to be a living. He settled on electrical engineering. Economic justi fications may not tell all. A friend of his studying in Berlin no ticed as late as 1922 that Szilard, despite his Eötvös Prize, fel t that his skill in mathematical operations could not compete wit h that of his colleagues. On the other hand, he was not alone amo ng Hungarians of future prominence in physics in avoiding the bac kwater science taught in Hungarian universities at the time. He began engineering studies in Budapest at the King Joseph Institu te of Technology, then was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army . Because he had a Gymnasium education he was sent directly to of ficers' school to train for the cavalry. A leave of absence almos t certainly saved his life. He asked for leave ostensibly to give his parents moral support while his brother had a serious operat ion. In fact, he was ill. He thought he had pneumonia. He wanted to be treated in Budapest, near his parents, rather than in a fro ntier Army hospital. He waited standing at attention for his comm anding officer to appear to hear his request while his fever burn ed at 102 degrees. The captain was reluctant; Szilard characteris tically insisted on his leave and got it, found friends to suppor t him to the train, arrived in Vienna with a lower temperature bu t a bad cough and reached Budapest and a decent hospital. His ill ness was diagnosed as Spanish influenza, one of the first cases o n the Austro-Hungarian side. The war was winding down. Using fami ly connections he arranged some weeks later to be mustered out. N ot long afterward, I heard that my own regiment, sent to the fron t, had been under severe attack and that all of my comrades had d isappeared. In the summer of 1919, when Lenin's Hungarian proté gé Bela Kun and his Communist and Social Democratic followers est ablished a short-lived Soviet republic in Hungary in the disorder ed aftermath of Austro-Hungarian defeat, Szilard decided it was t ime to study abroad. He was twenty-one years old. Just as he arra nged for a passport, at the beginning of August, the Kun regime c ollapsed; he managed another passport from the right-wing regime of Admiral Nicholas Horthy that succeeded it and left Hungary aro und Christmastime. Still reluctantly committed to engineering, Szilard enrolled in the Technische Hochschule, the technology ins titute, in Berlin. But what had seemed necessary in Hungary seeme d merely practical in Germany. The physics faculty of the Univers ity of Berlin included Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Planc k and Max von Laue, theoreticians of the first rank. Fritz Haber, whose method for fixing nitrogen from the air to make nitrates f or gunpowder saved Germany from early defeat in the Great War, wa s only one among many chemists and physicists of distinction at t he several government- and industry-sponsored Kaiser Wilhelm Inst itutes in the elegant Berlin suburb of Dahlem. The difference in scientific opportunity between Budapest and Berlin left Szilard p hysically unable to listen to engineering lectures. In the end, a s always, the subconscious proved stronger than the conscious and made it impossible for me to make any progress in my studies of engineering. Finally the ego gave in, and I left the Technische H ochschule to complete my studies at the University, some time aro und the middle of '21. Physics students at that time wandered E urope in search of exceptional masters much as their forebears in scholarship and craft had done since medieval days. Universities in Germany were institutions of the state; a professor was a sal aried civil servant who also collected fees directly from his stu dents for the courses he chose to give (a Privatdozent, by contra st, was a visiting scholar with teaching privileges who received no salary but might collect fees). If someone whose specialty you wished to learn taught at Munich, you went to Munich; if at Gött ingen, you went to Göttingen. Science grew out of the craft tradi tion in any case; in the first third of the twentieth century it retained -- and to some extent still retains -- an informal syste m of mastery and apprenticeship over which was laid the more rece nt system of the European graduate school. This informal collegia lity partly explains the feeling among scientists of Szilard's ge neration of membership in an exclusive group, almost a guild, of international scope and values. Szilard's good friend and fello w Hungarian, the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who was stu dying chemical engineering at the Technische Hochschule at the ti me of Szilard's conversion, watched him take the University of Be rlin by storm. As soon as it became clear to Szilard that physics was his real interest, he introduced himself, with characteristi c directness, to Albert Einstein. Einstein was a man who lived ap art -- preferring originality to repetition, he taught few course s -- but Wigner remembers that Szilard convinced him to give them a seminar on statistical mechanics. Max Planck was a gaunt, bald elder statesman whose study of radiation emitted by a uniformly heated surface (such as the interior of a kiln) had led him to di scover a universal constant of nature. He followed the canny trad ition among leading scientists of accepting only the most promisi ng students for tutelage; Szilard won his attention. Max von Laue , the handsome director of the university's Institute for Theoret ical Physics, who founded the science of X-ray crystallography an d created a popular sensation by thus making the atomic lattices of crystals visible for the first time, accepted Szilard into his brilliant course in relativity theory and eventually sponsored h is Ph.D. dissertation. The postwar German infection of despair, cynicism and rage at defeat ran a course close to febrile halluc ination in Berlin. The university, centrally located between Doro theenstrasse and Unter den Linden due east of the Brandenburg Gat e, was well positioned to observe the bizarre effects. Szilard mi ssed the November 1918 revolution that began among mutinous sailo rs at Kiel, quickly spread to Berlin and led to the retreat of th e Kaiser to Holland, to armistice and eventually to the founding, after bloody riots, of the insecure Weimar Republic. By the time he arrived in Berlin at the end of 1919 more than eight months o f martial law had been lifted, leaving a city at first starving a nd bleak but soon restored to intoxicating life. There was snow on the ground, an Englishman recalls of his first look at postwa r Berlin in the middle of the night, and the blend of snow, neon and huge hulking buildings was unearthly. You felt you had arrive d somewhere totally strange. To a German involved in the Berlin t heater of the 1920s the air was always bright, as if it were pepp ered, like New York late in autumn: you needed little sleep and n ever seemed tired. Nowhere else did you fail in such good form, n owhere else could you be knocked on the chin time and again witho ut being counted out. The German aristocracy retreated from view, and intellectuals, film stars and journalists took its place; th e major annual social event in the city where an imperial palace stood empty was the Press Ball, sponsored by the Berlin Pr, Simon & Schuster, 1995, 2.5, Penguin Books. Very Good. 6.04 x 1.17 x 9.18 inches. Paperback. 2007. 512 pages. <br>Coming from The Penguin Press in February 2009, Th omas E. Ricks's The Gamble Thomas E. Ricks 's #1 New York Times bestseller, Fiasco, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq. Now Ricks has picked up where Fiasco left off-Iraq, lat e 2005. With more newsbreaking information, including hundreds of hours of interviews with top U.S. officials who were on the grou nd during the surge and beyond, The Gamble is the natural compani on piece to Fiasco, and the two are sure to become the definitive examinations of what ultimately went wrong in Iraq. Editorial R eviews Review Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon corresponden t for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps (released in a 10th anniversary edition to accompany the paperback release of Fiasco) , has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Ir aq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in e arly 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds re sponsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--th e runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from boo ks like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more s keptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the h eart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, wh en, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the J ordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His stronge st critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and t hen failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it wi th conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes h is portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sourc es--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the tho usands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case fo r a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. The paper back edition of Fiasco includes a new postscript in which Ricks l ooks back on the year since the book's release, a year in which t he intensity and frequency of attacks on American soldiers only i ncreased and in which Ricks's challenging account became accepted as conventional wisdom, with many of the dissident officers in h is story given the reins of leadership, although Ricks still find s the prospects for the conflict grim. --Tom Nissley A Fiasco, a Year Later With the paperback release of Thomas Ricks's Fiasco, a year after the book became a #1 New York Times bestseller and an influential force in transforming the public perception (and t he perception within the military and the civilian government as well) of the war in Iraq, we asked Ricks in the questions below t o look back on the book and the year of conflict that have follow ed. On our page for the hardcover edition of Fiasco you can see o ur earlier Q&A with Ricks, and you can also see two lists he prep ared for Amazon customers: his choices for the 10 books for under standing Iraq that aren't about Iraq, a collection of studies of counterinsurgency warfare that became surprisingly popular last y ear as soldiers and civilians tried to understand the nature of t he new conflict, and, as a glimpse into his writing process, a pl aylist of the music he listened to while writing and researching the book. : When we spoke with you a year ago, you sa id that you thought you were done going back to Baghdad. But that dateline is still showing up in your reports. How have things ch anged in the city over the past year? Thomas E. Ricks: Yes, I h ad promised my wife that I wouldnÂ't go back. Iraq was taking a t oll on both of us--I think my trips of four to six weeks were har der on her than on me. But I found I couldn't stay away. The Ir aq war is the most important event of our time, I think, and will remain a major news story for years to come. And I felt like eve rything I had done for the last 15 years--from deployments I'd co vered to books and military manuals IÂ'd read (and written)--had prepared me to cover this event better than most reporters. So I made a deal with my wife that I would go back to Iraq but would n o longer do the riskiest things, such as go on combat patrols or on convoys. I used to have a rule that I would only take the risk s necessary to get the story. Now I don't take even those risks i f I can see them, even if that means missing part of a story. Als o, I try to keep my trips much shorter. How is Baghdad differen t? It is still a chaotic mess. But it doesn't feel quite as Hobbe sian as it did in early 2006. That said, it also feels a bit like a pause--with the so-called surge, Uncle Sam has put all his chi ps on the table, and the other players are waiting a bit to see h ow that plays out. : One of the remarkable things ove r the past year for a reader of Fiasco has been how much of what your book recommends has, apparently, been taken to heart by the military and civilian leadership. As you write in your new postsc ript to the paperback edition, the war has been turned over to th e dissidents. General David Petraeus, who was one of the first to put classic counterinsurgency tactics to use in Iraq, is now the top American commander there, and he has surrounded himself with others with similar views. What was that transformation like on the inside? Ricks: I was really struck when I was out in Baghda d two months ago at how different the American military felt. I u sed to hate going into the Green Zone because of all the unreal h appy talk I'd hear. It was a relief to leave the place, even if b eing outside it (and contrary to popular myth, most reporters do live outside it) was more dangerous. There is a new realism in the U.S. military. In May, I was getting a briefing from one offi cial in the Green Zone and I thought, Wow, not only does this bri efing strike me as accurate, it also is better said than I could do. That feeling was a real change from the old days. The other thing that struck me was the number of copies I saw of Fiasco as I knocked around Iraq. When I started writing it, the title was controversial. Now generals say things to me like, Got it, unders tand it, agree with it. I am told that the Army War College is ma king the book required reading this fall. : And what are its prospects at this late date? Ricks: The question remain s, Is it too little too late? It took the U.S. military four year s to get the strategy right in Iraq--that is, to understand that their goal should be to protect the people. By that time, the Ame rican people and the Iraqi people both had lost of lot of patienc e. (And by that time, the Iraq war had lasted longer than America n participation in World War II.) Also, it isn't clear that we ha ve enough troops to really implement this new strategy of protect ing the people. In some parts of Baghdad where U.S. troops now ha ve outposts, the streets are quieter. Yet we're seeing more viole nce on the outskirts of Baghdad. And the cities of Mosul and Kirk uk make me nervous. I am keeping an eye on them this summer and f all. The thing to watch in Iraq is whether we see more tribes m aking common cause with the U.S. and the Iraqi government. How lo ng will it last? And what does it mean in the long term for Iraq? Is it the beginning of a major change, or just a prelude to a bi g civil war? : You've been a student of the culture o f the military for years. How has the war affected the state of t he American military: the redeployments, the state of Guard and R eserves troops and the regular Army and Marines, and the relation ship to civilian leadership? Ricks: I think there is general ag reement that there is a huge strain on the military. Essentially, one percent of the nation--soldiers and their families--is carry ing the burden. We are now sending soldiers back for their third year-long tours. We've never tried to fight a lengthy ground war overseas with an all-volunteer force. Nor have we ever tried to o ccupy an Arab country. What the long-term effect is on the mili tary will depend in part on how the war ends for us, and for Iraq . But I think it isn't going to be good. Today I was talking to a retired officer and asked him what he was hearing from his frien ds in Iraq about troop morale. It's broken, he said. Meanwhile, h e said, soldiers he knows who are back home from Iraq wonder why they were there. Not everyone is as morose as this officer, but t he trend isn't good. : You quote Gen. Anthony Zinni i n your postscript as saying the U.S. is drifting toward containme nt in Iraq. What does containment of what will likely remain a ve ry hot conflict look like? You've written in your postscript and elsewhere that you think we are only in act III of a Shakespearea n tragedy. I wouldn't describe Shakespeare's fifth acts as partic ularly well contained. Ricks: I agree with you. Containment wou ld mean some sort of stepping back from the war, probably beginni ng by halving the American military presence. You'd probably stil l have U.S. troops inside Iraq, but disengaged from daily fightin g. Their goals would be negative ones: prevent genocide, prevent al Qaeda from being able to operate in Iraq, and prevent the war from spreading to outside Iraq. (This was laid out well in a rece nt study by James Miller and Shawn Brimley, readable at http://ww w.cnas.org/en/cms/?368.) Containment probably would be a messy and demoralizing mission. No one signs up in the U.S. military to stand by as innocents are slaughtered in nearby cities. Yet that might be the case if we did indeed move to this stance and a ful l-blown civil war (or a couple) ensued. And there surely would be refugees from such fighting. Either they would go to neighboring countries, and perhaps destabilize them, or we would set up refu gee catchment areas, as another study, by the Brookings Institute , proposed. The open-ended task of guarding those new refugee cam ps likely would fall to U.S. troops. The more you look at Iraq, the more worrisome it gets. As I noted in the new postscript in the paperback edition, many strategic experts I talk to believe t hat the consequences of the Iraq war are going to be worse for th e United States than was the fallout from the Vietnam War. Amaz on.com: A year and a half is a long time, but let's say that we h ave a Democratic president in January 2009: President Clinton, or Gore, or Obama. What prospect would a change in administration h ave for a new strategic opening? Or would the new president likel y wind up like Nixon in Vietnam, owning a war he or she didn't be gin? Ricks: Not such a long time. President Bush has made his m ajor decisions on Iraq. Troop levels are going to have to come do wn next year, because we don't have replacements on the shelf. So the three big questions for the U.S. government are going to be: How many troops will be withdrawn, what will be the mission of t hose who remain, and how long will they stay? Those questions are going to be answered by the next president, not this one. My g ut feeling is the latter: I think we are going to have troops in Iraq through 2009, and probably for a few years beyond that. Inde ed, I wouldn't be surprised if U.S. troops were there in 15 years . But as I say in Fiasco, that's kind of a best-case scenario. Review Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essenti al reading. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The best accou nt yet of the entire war. -Vanity Fair Review Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading. -Michiko Kaku tani, The New York Times The best account yet of the entire war. -Vanity Fair About the Author Thomas E. Ricks is The Washingto n 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 sev enteen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for na tional 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. </div ., Penguin Books, 2007, 3<

2005, ISBN: 9780143038917

Gebundene Ausgabe

Penguin Books. Very Good. 6.04 x 1.17 x 9.18 inches. Paperback. 2007. 512 pages. <br>Coming from The Penguin Press in February 2009, Th omas E. Ricks's The Gamble Thomas E. Ric… Mehr…

Penguin Books. Very Good. 6.04 x 1.17 x 9.18 inches. Paperback. 2007. 512 pages. <br>Coming from The Penguin Press in February 2009, Th omas E. Ricks's The Gamble Thomas E. Ricks 's #1 New York Times bestseller, Fiasco, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq. Now Ricks has picked up where Fiasco left off-Iraq, lat e 2005. With more newsbreaking information, including hundreds of hours of interviews with top U.S. officials who were on the grou nd during the surge and beyond, The Gamble is the natural compani on piece to Fiasco, and the two are sure to become the definitive examinations of what ultimately went wrong in Iraq. Editorial R eviews Review Fiasco is a more strongly worded title than you might expect a seasoned military reporter such as Thomas E. Ricks to use, accustomed as he is to the even-handed style of daily newspaper journalism. But Ricks, the Pentagon corresponden t for the Washington Post and the author of the acclaimed account of Marine Corps boot camp, Making the Corps (released in a 10th anniversary edition to accompany the paperback release of Fiasco) , has written a thorough and devastating history of the war in Ir aq from the planning stages through the continued insurgency in e arly 2006, and he does not shy away from naming those he finds re sponsible. His tragic story is divided in two. The first part--th e runup to the war and the invasion in 2003--is familiar from boo ks like Cobra II and Plan of Attack, although Ricks uses his many military sources to portray an officer class that was far more s keptical of the war beforehand than generally reported. But the h eart of his book is the second half, beginning in August 2003, wh en, as he writes, the war really began, with the bombing of the J ordanian embassy and the emergence of the insurgency. His stronge st critique is that the U.S. military failed to anticipate--and t hen failed to recognize--the insurgency, and tried to fight it wi th conventional methods that only fanned its flames. What makes h is portrait particularly damning are the dozens of military sourc es--most of them on record--who join in his critique, and the tho usands of pages of internal documents he uses to make his case fo r a war poorly planned and bravely but blindly fought. The paper back edition of Fiasco includes a new postscript in which Ricks l ooks back on the year since the book's release, a year in which t he intensity and frequency of attacks on American soldiers only i ncreased and in which Ricks's challenging account became accepted as conventional wisdom, with many of the dissident officers in h is story given the reins of leadership, although Ricks still find s the prospects for the conflict grim. --Tom Nissley A Fiasco, a Year Later With the paperback release of Thomas Ricks's Fiasco, a year after the book became a #1 New York Times bestseller and an influential force in transforming the public perception (and t he perception within the military and the civilian government as well) of the war in Iraq, we asked Ricks in the questions below t o look back on the book and the year of conflict that have follow ed. On our page for the hardcover edition of Fiasco you can see o ur earlier Q&A with Ricks, and you can also see two lists he prep ared for Amazon customers: his choices for the 10 books for under standing Iraq that aren't about Iraq, a collection of studies of counterinsurgency warfare that became surprisingly popular last y ear as soldiers and civilians tried to understand the nature of t he new conflict, and, as a glimpse into his writing process, a pl aylist of the music he listened to while writing and researching the book. : When we spoke with you a year ago, you sa id that you thought you were done going back to Baghdad. But that dateline is still showing up in your reports. How have things ch anged in the city over the past year? Thomas E. Ricks: Yes, I h ad promised my wife that I wouldnÂ't go back. Iraq was taking a t oll on both of us--I think my trips of four to six weeks were har der on her than on me. But I found I couldn't stay away. The Ir aq war is the most important event of our time, I think, and will remain a major news story for years to come. And I felt like eve rything I had done for the last 15 years--from deployments I'd co vered to books and military manuals IÂ'd read (and written)--had prepared me to cover this event better than most reporters. So I made a deal with my wife that I would go back to Iraq but would n o longer do the riskiest things, such as go on combat patrols or on convoys. I used to have a rule that I would only take the risk s necessary to get the story. Now I don't take even those risks i f I can see them, even if that means missing part of a story. Als o, I try to keep my trips much shorter. How is Baghdad differen t? It is still a chaotic mess. But it doesn't feel quite as Hobbe sian as it did in early 2006. That said, it also feels a bit like a pause--with the so-called surge, Uncle Sam has put all his chi ps on the table, and the other players are waiting a bit to see h ow that plays out. : One of the remarkable things ove r the past year for a reader of Fiasco has been how much of what your book recommends has, apparently, been taken to heart by the military and civilian leadership. As you write in your new postsc ript to the paperback edition, the war has been turned over to th e dissidents. General David Petraeus, who was one of the first to put classic counterinsurgency tactics to use in Iraq, is now the top American commander there, and he has surrounded himself with others with similar views. What was that transformation like on the inside? Ricks: I was really struck when I was out in Baghda d two months ago at how different the American military felt. I u sed to hate going into the Green Zone because of all the unreal h appy talk I'd hear. It was a relief to leave the place, even if b eing outside it (and contrary to popular myth, most reporters do live outside it) was more dangerous. There is a new realism in the U.S. military. In May, I was getting a briefing from one offi cial in the Green Zone and I thought, Wow, not only does this bri efing strike me as accurate, it also is better said than I could do. That feeling was a real change from the old days. The other thing that struck me was the number of copies I saw of Fiasco as I knocked around Iraq. When I started writing it, the title was controversial. Now generals say things to me like, Got it, unders tand it, agree with it. I am told that the Army War College is ma king the book required reading this fall. : And what are its prospects at this late date? Ricks: The question remain s, Is it too little too late? It took the U.S. military four year s to get the strategy right in Iraq--that is, to understand that their goal should be to protect the people. By that time, the Ame rican people and the Iraqi people both had lost of lot of patienc e. (And by that time, the Iraq war had lasted longer than America n participation in World War II.) Also, it isn't clear that we ha ve enough troops to really implement this new strategy of protect ing the people. In some parts of Baghdad where U.S. troops now ha ve outposts, the streets are quieter. Yet we're seeing more viole nce on the outskirts of Baghdad. And the cities of Mosul and Kirk uk make me nervous. I am keeping an eye on them this summer and f all. The thing to watch in Iraq is whether we see more tribes m aking common cause with the U.S. and the Iraqi government. How lo ng will it last? And what does it mean in the long term for Iraq? Is it the beginning of a major change, or just a prelude to a bi g civil war? : You've been a student of the culture o f the military for years. How has the war affected the state of t he American military: the redeployments, the state of Guard and R eserves troops and the regular Army and Marines, and the relation ship to civilian leadership? Ricks: I think there is general ag reement that there is a huge strain on the military. Essentially, one percent of the nation--soldiers and their families--is carry ing the burden. We are now sending soldiers back for their third year-long tours. We've never tried to fight a lengthy ground war overseas with an all-volunteer force. Nor have we ever tried to o ccupy an Arab country. What the long-term effect is on the mili tary will depend in part on how the war ends for us, and for Iraq . But I think it isn't going to be good. Today I was talking to a retired officer and asked him what he was hearing from his frien ds in Iraq about troop morale. It's broken, he said. Meanwhile, h e said, soldiers he knows who are back home from Iraq wonder why they were there. Not everyone is as morose as this officer, but t he trend isn't good. : You quote Gen. Anthony Zinni i n your postscript as saying the U.S. is drifting toward containme nt in Iraq. What does containment of what will likely remain a ve ry hot conflict look like? You've written in your postscript and elsewhere that you think we are only in act III of a Shakespearea n tragedy. I wouldn't describe Shakespeare's fifth acts as partic ularly well contained. Ricks: I agree with you. Containment wou ld mean some sort of stepping back from the war, probably beginni ng by halving the American military presence. You'd probably stil l have U.S. troops inside Iraq, but disengaged from daily fightin g. Their goals would be negative ones: prevent genocide, prevent al Qaeda from being able to operate in Iraq, and prevent the war from spreading to outside Iraq. (This was laid out well in a rece nt study by James Miller and Shawn Brimley, readable at http://ww w.cnas.org/en/cms/?368.) Containment probably would be a messy and demoralizing mission. No one signs up in the U.S. military to stand by as innocents are slaughtered in nearby cities. Yet that might be the case if we did indeed move to this stance and a ful l-blown civil war (or a couple) ensued. And there surely would be refugees from such fighting. Either they would go to neighboring countries, and perhaps destabilize them, or we would set up refu gee catchment areas, as another study, by the Brookings Institute , proposed. The open-ended task of guarding those new refugee cam ps likely would fall to U.S. troops. The more you look at Iraq, the more worrisome it gets. As I noted in the new postscript in the paperback edition, many strategic experts I talk to believe t hat the consequences of the Iraq war are going to be worse for th e United States than was the fallout from the Vietnam War. Amaz on.com: A year and a half is a long time, but let's say that we h ave a Democratic president in January 2009: President Clinton, or Gore, or Obama. What prospect would a change in administration h ave for a new strategic opening? Or would the new president likel y wind up like Nixon in Vietnam, owning a war he or she didn't be gin? Ricks: Not such a long time. President Bush has made his m ajor decisions on Iraq. Troop levels are going to have to come do wn next year, because we don't have replacements on the shelf. So the three big questions for the U.S. government are going to be: How many troops will be withdrawn, what will be the mission of t hose who remain, and how long will they stay? Those questions are going to be answered by the next president, not this one. My g ut feeling is the latter: I think we are going to have troops in Iraq through 2009, and probably for a few years beyond that. Inde ed, I wouldn't be surprised if U.S. troops were there in 15 years . But as I say in Fiasco, that's kind of a best-case scenario. Review Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essenti al reading. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The best accou nt yet of the entire war. -Vanity Fair Review Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading. -Michiko Kaku tani, The New York Times The best account yet of the entire war. -Vanity Fair About the Author Thomas E. Ricks is The Washingto n 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 sev enteen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for na tional 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. </div ., Penguin Books, 2007, 3<

2005, ISBN: 9780143038917

Penguin Books. Used - Good. . . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to t… Mehr…

Penguin Books. Used - Good. . . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business., Penguin Books, 2.5<

2005, ISBN: 9780143038917

Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007-07-31. Paperback. Good. 1.4000 in x 9.2000 in x 6.0000 in. Cover has some wear, marks and old price tag. Clean pages., Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007-07-31, 2.5