Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. As if to validate that old adage, the first few years of the Iraq war have produced a spate of memoirs that amount to denials of paternity.
The tragedy of Ric Sanchez is that his fast ascent culminated in an assignment for which he was not prepared and not suited. He went overnight from commanding fewer than 20,000 soldiers in one division to commanding 180,000 U.S. and allied soldiers trying to gain control of 25 million Iraqis. Reflecting a generally held view, Tom Ricks's "Fiasco" quotes one officer as saying, "He was in over his head." The general's denunciations of others would be more convincing if he were prepared to admit the painful truth about himself.
