thedrifter
02-18-09, 09:06 AM
NONFICTION
A journalist's inside scoop on the Iraq war
A journalist digs deeply into dissidence within U.S. military, the surge and the massacre in Haditha. BY TIM RUTTEN
THE GAMBLE: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin. 400 pages. $27.95.
``In 2005 the United States came close to losing the war in Iraq.''
So writes Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post's senior military correspondent, in his gripping and brilliantly reported new book. This is contemporary history of a vivid and urgent sort, and Ricks has produced a book that deserves to be read by any American who realizes that something other than today's economic news is of vital interest to the nation.
Ricks begins this sober -- and deeply sobering -- account with the military's heretofore secret report on the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines at Haditha, an incident that stands as exemplar for a strategy that not only was failing tactically but also seriously eroding the morale and morality of the American forces deployed to Iraq. The author then goes on to document the previously untold history of the failure of the White House and the Pentagon under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs and the commanders.
Essentially, this is the story of two insurgencies: One is that of the Iraqis and the Islamists who flocked there after the American invasion; the other has to do with the small number of dissident U.S. officers (of whom Gen. David H. Petraeus was the most prominent), retired officers (particularly Gen. Jack Keane), military historians and conservative defense intellectuals centered on the American Enterprise Institute who mounted a guerrilla campaign to make the George W. Bush administration confront its mistakes and adopt an effective counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq.
We know that strategy as ''the surge,'' and, in essence, it was a distillation of the counter-insurgency lessons that had been learned in every such conflict from postwar Malaya and Algeria through Vietnam. An insurgent, as Mao pointed out, must ''swim like a fish in the sea of the people.'' To fight him, Keane, Petraeus and their allies -- like AEI's Fred Kaplan -- would successfully argue to the White House, U.S. forces would have to do the same. It all worked, though, as Ricks carefully points out, in a limited way: The surge staved off defeat, but it did not achieve anything like victory in any sense in which we conventionally understand the word.
The second half of The Gamble is a detailed and utterly gripping account of what Petraeus and his commanders did with their own theories (and all that unconventional advice) and how ''the surge'' that resulted achieved the tenuous quasi-stability that now prevails in much of Iraq.
Ricks has produced a book of critical importance not only to our understanding of recent history in Iraq but also one that makes an indispensable contribution to our grasp of contemporary relations between our government's military and civilian authorities and to our understanding of the Pentagon's leadership.
There's also something rather heartening about Ricks' story of the internal military insurgency -- or, more precisely, the loyal opposition -- that appears to have rescued America, at least for now, from defeat in Iraq. In another awful winter, when the Baron von Steuben began drilling George Washington's Continental Army into an effective fighting force, he wrote to a friend back in Prussia about the difference between the soldiers he'd commanded there and his new subordinates. European soldiers, he wrote, simply needed to be told what to do, and they grudgingly would do it. The Americans, he wrote, first needed to be told why something was necessary -- and, if convinced, executed the order vigorously and without further instruction.
May that always be so, for it is in that quality that our national security ultimately resides.
Tim Rutten reviewed this book for The Los Angeles Times.
Ellie
A journalist's inside scoop on the Iraq war
A journalist digs deeply into dissidence within U.S. military, the surge and the massacre in Haditha. BY TIM RUTTEN
THE GAMBLE: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. Thomas E. Ricks. Penguin. 400 pages. $27.95.
``In 2005 the United States came close to losing the war in Iraq.''
So writes Thomas E. Ricks, The Washington Post's senior military correspondent, in his gripping and brilliantly reported new book. This is contemporary history of a vivid and urgent sort, and Ricks has produced a book that deserves to be read by any American who realizes that something other than today's economic news is of vital interest to the nation.
Ricks begins this sober -- and deeply sobering -- account with the military's heretofore secret report on the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines at Haditha, an incident that stands as exemplar for a strategy that not only was failing tactically but also seriously eroding the morale and morality of the American forces deployed to Iraq. The author then goes on to document the previously untold history of the failure of the White House and the Pentagon under then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs and the commanders.
Essentially, this is the story of two insurgencies: One is that of the Iraqis and the Islamists who flocked there after the American invasion; the other has to do with the small number of dissident U.S. officers (of whom Gen. David H. Petraeus was the most prominent), retired officers (particularly Gen. Jack Keane), military historians and conservative defense intellectuals centered on the American Enterprise Institute who mounted a guerrilla campaign to make the George W. Bush administration confront its mistakes and adopt an effective counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq.
We know that strategy as ''the surge,'' and, in essence, it was a distillation of the counter-insurgency lessons that had been learned in every such conflict from postwar Malaya and Algeria through Vietnam. An insurgent, as Mao pointed out, must ''swim like a fish in the sea of the people.'' To fight him, Keane, Petraeus and their allies -- like AEI's Fred Kaplan -- would successfully argue to the White House, U.S. forces would have to do the same. It all worked, though, as Ricks carefully points out, in a limited way: The surge staved off defeat, but it did not achieve anything like victory in any sense in which we conventionally understand the word.
The second half of The Gamble is a detailed and utterly gripping account of what Petraeus and his commanders did with their own theories (and all that unconventional advice) and how ''the surge'' that resulted achieved the tenuous quasi-stability that now prevails in much of Iraq.
Ricks has produced a book of critical importance not only to our understanding of recent history in Iraq but also one that makes an indispensable contribution to our grasp of contemporary relations between our government's military and civilian authorities and to our understanding of the Pentagon's leadership.
There's also something rather heartening about Ricks' story of the internal military insurgency -- or, more precisely, the loyal opposition -- that appears to have rescued America, at least for now, from defeat in Iraq. In another awful winter, when the Baron von Steuben began drilling George Washington's Continental Army into an effective fighting force, he wrote to a friend back in Prussia about the difference between the soldiers he'd commanded there and his new subordinates. European soldiers, he wrote, simply needed to be told what to do, and they grudgingly would do it. The Americans, he wrote, first needed to be told why something was necessary -- and, if convinced, executed the order vigorously and without further instruction.
May that always be so, for it is in that quality that our national security ultimately resides.
Tim Rutten reviewed this book for The Los Angeles Times.
Ellie