The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq from a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Thomas E. Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, puts forth in Fiascoa masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq, now with a preface on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel-including more than one hundred senior officers-and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account- explosive, shocking, and authoritative-of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.