25 NOVEMBER 2006, Page 44

A NNE A PPLEBAUM If you have to choose a single volume

from the enormous stack of books on Iraq published this year, choose Tom Ricks’s Fiasco (Allen Lane, £25). Unlike many of the other writers, Ricks didn’t start out in opposition to the war — he’s been on the Pentagon beat for years, has famously good contacts among US army brass, and is not exactly a common-orgarden anti-American pacifist. But it is precisely his sympathy for American soldiers that makes this book so good: step by step, he shows how the higher-ups betrayed the army with catastrophically bad planning and a failure to clarify the basic goals of the mission. There will be no better explanation of what went wrong and why.