The road to disaster

Iraq War:Two complementary books explore the American invasion of Iraq and its consequences An estimated 655,000 Iraqis and close to 3,000 US servicemen have been killed

It is perhaps the deepest mystery of our young century: how did a seedy Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi, four pro-Israeli Jewish Americans with ties to the Pentagon, named Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, the outgoing defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Dick Cheney drag the United States into what has already been called "the greatest strategic disaster in American history"?

Thomas E Ricks, the Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, knows the guilty parties, and his masterpiece of a book explains how and why the US invaded Iraq, and what the terrible consequences have been.

As deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz was the most zealous in pushing for war, building "the mirage that ultimately would become the Bush administration's version of Iraq - a land saturated both with weapons of mass destruction and a yearning to be liberated by American troops," Ricks writes.

Wolfowitz also claimed that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction, and that the danger of sectarian conflict was highly exaggerated. He has been proven wrong on every count.

There were 34,131 insurgent attacks in Iraq last year. By the middle of this year, the war had cost US taxpayers $250 billion (€190 billion). Most analysts date the start of the Shia-Sunni civil war to the bombing of the golden-domed mosque in Samarra last February.

A dubious parallel between Hitler and Saddam Hussein was central to the thinking of Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the under-secretary of defence for policy. "That sense of what happened in Europe in [the second] World War has shaped a lot of my views," Wolfowitz told the New York Times. "My family got wiped out by Hitler, and . . . all this stuff about working things out - well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn't make any sense to me," Feith told the New Yorker magazine.

By the time Wolfowitz was called to account by the House Armed Services Committee in June 2004, the occupation of Iraq had already seen long battles between US forces, Sunni rebels in Falluja and the Shia Muslims of Sadr City and Najaf, as well as the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. But Wolfowitz persisted with his Nazi obsession, saying Saddam's intelligence service was "the modern-day equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo" and the Fedayeen Saddam were "like the Hitler Youth".

The Pentagon placed mind-boggling faith in Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted fraudster whom the US now accuses of spying for Iran - and who provided bogus intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. Douglas Feith told Gen Jay Garner, the first US administrator of Iraq: "You know, Jay, when you get [to Baghdad], we could just make Chalabi president."

Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, who was known as "the prince of darkness", said Chalabi was "the most effective individual that we could have hoped would emerge in Iraq" and "the person most likely to give us reliable advice".

A host of people, including high- ranking military officers, correctly predicted disaster if the US invaded Iraq. Chief among them was the retired Marine, Gen Anthony Zinni, a former head of US Central Command. Back in 1998, as the push for "regime change" in Iraq gained momentum, Zinni told a group of defence reporters that "a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn't done carefully, is more dangerous than a contained Saddam is now".

Just as the neoconservatives were shaped by the second World War, Zinni and many of his fellow officers were haunted by Vietnam. On a cold, wet day in November 1970, Zinni lay on a hillside near Danang "his lifeblood seeping into the dirt from three North Vietnamese AK-47 rounds", Ricks writes. While recuperating "he vowed that if he ever had a chance to stop a situation like this from happening again to another young soldier, he would". A year into the Iraq war, Zinni said: "I have seen this movie. It was called Vietnam."

RICKS WRITES ALMOST exclusively about the US side of the war. Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for the London Independent who has been travelling to Iraq since 1978, is a shrewd observer of both Americans and Iraqis.

Their books complement each other. For example, Ricks reports on the seven bars, hot dogs, baked beans and Westchester County 914 telephone code inside the US-protected Green Zone in Baghdad. But it takes an insider like Cockburn to quote Ghazi al-Yawer, briefly president of Iraq, observing that the Green Zone bears "the same relationship to the rest of Iraq as a safari park does to the real jungle".

An Iraqi friend of Cockburn's living inside the Green Zone told him how the brothel near the former Republican Palace continued to function after the invasion. The prostitutes wrote anti-American, pro-Ba'athist slogans in Arabic in lipstick on the mirrors above the washbasins, which their new American clients could not read.

Cockburn proves that with courage and ingenuity, it is possible to work in Iraq, albeit at the risk of being kidnapped or murdered. He shows his resourcefulness in many ways: driving up alongside Iraqi cars in petrol queues to do interviews through the window; talking to Shia executives from the oil ministry as they donated blood for the Sunni of Falluja in Baghdad's main blood bank; debunking the Iraqi government's claim that the majority of provinces were "completely safe" by meeting drivers at a truck depot.

In October 2005, I had dinner with Cockburn at the Hamra Hotel, a few weeks before it was partly destroyed by two suicide bombers. He talked about Marla Ruzicka, the young Californian woman who died in a suicide bombing on the airport road. Cockburn knew Margaret Hassan, the Irish-born aid worker believed to have been murdered by her kidnappers, and Mazen Dana, the Palestinian cameraman for Reuters news agency, shot dead by the Americans outside Abu Ghraib prison. Though he mentions all three in his book, I couldn't help wishing that he'd let down his reserve to tell us more about these lost friends.

With an estimated 655,000 Iraqis and close to 3,000 US servicemen killed, one of the most galling things is the way warmongers and incompetents have been rewarded.

Paul Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank in April 2005. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gen Tommy Franks, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer, and the former director of the CIA George Tenet, identified by Ricks as "three of the figures most responsible for the mishandling of Iraq in 2003 and 2004".

As a member of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, Kenneth Adelman wrote a now-famous article in the Washington Post in 2002, saying "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk".

Around the time of the Republican defeat in the mid-term election, Adelman and Perle gave interviews condemning the Bush administration for its handling of the war they lobbied so hard for. The rats are jumping ship.

Ricks gives the impression that Bush was misled by a devious entourage. Cockburn poses the question of accountability more acutely. "The American generals had a point in saying that Rumsfeld should have been fired for incompetence," Cockburn wrote before Rumsfeld was sacked. "But the same charge could be levelled at the whole of the Bush administration, starting with the president."

So what will happen in Iraq? Perle last month told Vanity Fair magazine that total defeat, including a US withdrawal that would leave behind a "failed state", was becoming more likely. "And then," added "the prince of darkness", "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

• Lara Marlowe covered the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, and has returned there repeatedly for The Irish Timesduring the occupation

• Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in IraqBy Thomas E Ricks Allen Lane, 482pp. £12.99 The Occupation: War and Resistance in IraqBy Patrick Cockburn Verso, 229pp. £15.99