Fiasco.

Wikipedia says a fiasco means "a complete or humiliating failure, especially of a pretentious undertaking." What an appropriate title for a book. I suspect this is a book we all need to read, although for some of us it just reinforces what we've known for some time.

"President George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003 ultimately may come to be seen as one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy,"Mr. Ricks writes. "The consequences of his choice won't be clear for decades, but it already is abundantly apparent in mid-2006 that the U.S. government went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information -- about weapons of mass destruction and a supposed nexus between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda's terrorism -- and then occupied the country negligently. Thousands of U.S. troops and an untold number of Iraqis have died. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them squandered. Democracy may yet come to Iraq and the region, but so too may civil war or a regional conflagration, which in turn could lead to spiraling oil prices and a global economic shock."

And, now that we seem to have lost the war we initiated in Iraq, it's time for a new war in Lebanon/Israel. Screw up one thing and it's time to move on to screw up somewhere else. Worst thing is that they all impact each other.