'Fiasco' Author Reports On the Petraeus Report

Fresh Air

Published September 12, 2007 at 11:13 AM EDT

Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, discusses this week's long-awaited progress report from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top two American officials in Iraq.

Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of the best-selling book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It's just come out in paperback.

He tells Terry Gross that in their Congressional testimony this week, Petraeus and Crocker essentially described Iraq as "a place teetering on the edge of disaster, where we have very few options, and where we have to really cross our fingers and hope for the best."

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'Fiasco' Author Reports On the Petraeus Report

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