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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

thedrifter
02-18-09, 09:07 AM
BOOK REVIEW
'Gamble' weighs shifting US strategy for war in Iraq

By Chuck Leddy | February 18, 2009

In his 2006 bestseller "Fiasco," Washington Post special military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks described the failure of US strategy in the first few years of the Iraq War. Rather than being welcomed as liberators, as Ricks showed, US forces found themselves up against a powerful and growing insurgency.

In his absorbing, impressively researched new book, "The Gamble," Ricks examines how US goals in Iraq changed in late 2006. Through his impressive access to military and political leaders, Ricks demonstrates that what fueled this change was the lack of any recognizable progress in Iraq.

Ricks opens his account with an example of the first, failed approach. In late 2005, US Marines were patrolling in Haditha, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad. After one of them was killed by a roadside bomb, the other Marines "began moving toward the houses along the road, 'running and gunning' in Marine parlance." Twenty-four Iraqis, including a 1-year-old child and an old man in a wheelchair, ended up dead. The author sums up the approach this way: "Protect yourself at all costs, focus on attacking the enemy, and treat the Iraqi civilians" as potentially dangerous.

By late 2006, US forces in Iraq were demoralized and directionless, reports Ricks. "The Gamble" recounts how a few passionate men and women, some of them skeptics about the initial 2003 invasion, would alter US military strategy by going around the chain of command and appealing directly to the White House.

At the center of the story is General David Petraeus, an intellectual who wrote the military's manual on counter-insurgency. He, along with retired general Jack Keane, would push for a counterinsurgency strategy: "You must protect the people and separate them from the insurgents, and to do so you had to live among the population. And doing all that required a lot of troops." Petraeus wanted US troops out of their big bases and armored vehicles, moving freely among the Iraqi population, building relationships that would foster better intelligence gathering.

Of course, there was opposition to Petraeus's idea. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Petraeus's boss, General George Casey Jr., both disliked it. But Petraeus's biggest ally was the obvious failure of the old strategy. Both he and Keane appealed directly to President Bush to make a change. After the 2006 midterm elections resulted in significant Republican losses, Bush fired Rumsfeld and opened the way for Petraeus's "surge."

The second half of "The Gamble" outlines the implementation of Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy. Petraeus began by lowering the Bush administration's lofty expectations: Nobody on the ground believed democracy and sectarian reconciliation were possible anytime soon, so Petraeus instead aimed for a lessening of violence. But putting US troops out among the population "exposed them to hellacious new levels of violence," writes Ricks, and there were casualties early on as the insurgents hit back.

Yet the strategy ultimately worked, in terms of security. The United States found allies among Sunni militias who hated Al Qaeda in Iraq, and while often unsavory, they provided solid intelligence and additional firepower: "They spoke the language, they knew the area, and they knew who wasn't from it." By the beginning of 2008, the new strategy was making measurable gains.

In the end, the surge would have mixed results. It clearly improved the security situation, but its promise of providing Iraq with political reconciliation has not been met. This lack of political progress will keep US forces stuck in Iraq, Ricks glumly states: "I don't think the Iraq war is over, and I worry that there is more to come than any of us suspect."

Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester.

Ellie