Now that the Bush administration is history, it's worth noting that the consequences of the Bush administration are still with us. The Iraq war will last for years. Some people predicted this would happen when the war began in 2003, but most Americans supported the war and actually thought Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks.

You don't just invade a country and then leave. In the case of the Iraq war, we invaded and destroyed the place and handed the Iraqi people a civil war. A philosopher might argue that we have a moral obligation to stick around to clean up the mess. A contrarian might say that the arsonist should not be allowed to put out the fire.

Where am I going with this? One consequence of the Bush administration is that some very good investigative journalists made a living writing excellent books about the inner workings of the administration and how the war was planned and executed. One of these writers, Thomas Ricks, wrote a book called "Fiasco." I read the book, and I do not recall that Ricks was a flaming liberal who wanted to embarass the administration. But the title of the book says it all.

Ricks has now written another book, a sequal to "Fiasco." He calls it "The Gamble." The review in the New York Times is quite sobering, reporting that Ricks believes the war is only half over. If that's the case, the hundreds of billions of dollars have yet to be spent on this folly. Here's an excerpt from the review:

Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating 2006 book, “Fiasco,” provided a lucid, tough-minded assessment of the Iraq war, brilliantly summing up the political and military mistakes that had brought the United States, after more than three years of occupation, to a terrible tipping point there. Drawing upon the author’s reporting on the ground in Iraq and his many sources within the uniformed military, “Fiasco” chronicled how the United States “went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information,” and how flawed assumptions, drastic planning failures and plain old-fashioned hubris led to a “derelict occupation” that fueled a burgeoning insurgency.

In his equally powerful and illuminating new book, “The Gamble,” Mr. Ricks, who covered the military for The Washington Post from 2000 to 2008, takes up the story where he left off in “Fiasco.” This volume recounts how Iraq came close to unraveling in 2006, how the Bush administration finally conceded it was off course, and how a new set of commanders — headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno — began putting a radically different strategy in place.

. . .

While Mr. Ricks praises General Petraeus’s success in helping the military regain the strategic initiative in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement” — reducing violence and reviving “American prospects in the war” — he also reminds us that the surge was meant to “create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward,” and that that outcome is still unclear. “The best grade” the surge campaign can be given, he says, “is a solid incomplete.”

. . .

Although Mr. Ricks writes that he is saddened by the war’s “obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans” and by “the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted much of it,” he adds that he has come to the conclusion that “we can’t leave.”

As Mr. Ricks sees it, the regional and global repercussions of failure in Iraq would be far more dire than those incurred by the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam — ranging, in this case, from a full-blown civil war to “a spreading war in the Middle East,” from a stronger Iran presiding over a Finlandized Iraq to the rise of a brutal new Iraq led by “younger, tougher versions” of Saddam Hussein, who “by the time of the invasion was an aging, almost toothless tiger.”

Other assessments offered by Mr. Ricks in this volume are equally provocative. He writes that as a presidential candidate Senator John McCain “seemed most detached from reality, essentially not listening to Petraeus and instead laying out a concept for an ending that seemed unreachable,” describing Iraq “in terms that were eerily similar to how the Bush administration had described it on the eve of the invasion, as a country that the Americans would transform and turn into an engine of change for the entire region.” And Mr. Ricks predicts that with a smaller American presence in Iraq and more Iraqi elections scheduled for 2009, this year will most likely prove to be “a particularly difficult” one for President Obama and the Pentagon.

. . .

He adds that the Bush White House was so reluctant to acknowledge the worsening course of the war, suppressing dissent and “substituting loyalty for analysis,” that without the midterm elections of November 2006, which transferred control of Congress to the Democrats, the administration “might never have contemplated the major revisions in strategy and leadership that it would make in the following two months.” Until the election, he writes, “Bush seemed satisfied with blather. After it, he began to speak about the war seriously.”

. . .

This volume leaves the reader with an understanding of the hard-won military dynamics of the surge and the professionalism and competence of the generals who designed and executed it. But the dominant impression left by “The Gamble” and “Fiasco” is one of the devastating consequences of an ill-conceived and ill-planned war — an unnecessary war of choice, waged with too few troops and no overarching strategic plan, a war that was going badly but was allowed to continue along the same unfruitful path for three years by a White House “in denial” about its downward trend. It is a war, Mr. Ricks writes, that may well become “America’s longest war, passing the American Revolution and even the Vietnam War.”

“No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends,” he writes at the conclusion of this important and chilling book, “it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 — which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”

In other words, he adds, “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”