THIS tell-all about the United States' flat-footedness in Iraq today is just about the best book you can buy on this colossal military quagmire.

Frank and reliable, Ricks has no ostensible agenda other than to give you, the reader, the awful truth. Which is simply that, as he puts it, the Iraq war was 'based perhaps on the worst war plan in American history'.

In a style as clear as ice, and just as chilling, he affords you a blow-by-blow account of how clunkily the US has gone about this tour of duty, which Ricks concludes will be far harder for it to disengage from than Vietnam in the early 1970s. This is chiefly because, well, there is no discernible strategy for fighting the war, let alone exiting it.

The author's preference for understatement throughout is largely why his measured recounting of the battle scares and scars is so compelling.

It is a much-needed device because you would not credit the knock-kneed ways in which the soldiers go about trying to pacify the Iraqis without first understanding how Iraq and the Iraqis think and work.

It is enough to say that the US Army unleashed all its firepower on an insurgency which should actually be fought in small sorties.

To know how excellent this book is, you need only compare it to the just-released State Of Denial by Ricks' Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward.

While Woodward frustrates readers with his dramatic tales of White House shenanigans without any sources on record to back them up, Ricks is rigorous in naming from where and whom he got his damning information.

If one has to quibble, Ricks might have achieved optimum balance if he had taken a few steps back and given readers pause for thought by assessing the bigger picture.

As it stands, Fiasco is a compelling record of exactly what is going on on the ground in Iraq today.

History has rarely seen such unalloyed folly.

If you like this, read: I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story by Rick Bragg (2004, US$10.36 or S$16.15, www.amazon.com).

Pulitzer Prize-winning Bragg re-enacts the kidnapping of Private Jessica Lynch through to her rescue when the US Army stormed the hospital she was in at the start of the Iraq war in 2003.

FIASCO
By Thomas E. Ricks
Penguin Allen Lane/Paperback/
482 pages/ $35.95 (without GST)/ Major bookstores

This story was first published in The Straits Times on November 19, 2006.