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War without end?
THE GAMBLE:
General David Petraeus and the American
Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
By Thomas E. Ricks
400 pp. Penguin Press HC 27.95
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
By 2005, the Iraq war had soured. American deaths exceeded 4,000, and Iraqi civilians suffered even heavier losses. The U.S. was drifting toward defeat until a few top military leaders persuaded President Bush to gamble on a troop surge and a whole new strategy.
As Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks notes in The Gamble, we cannot kill our way out of Iraq. This is a war of counterinsurgency, in which the more bad guys we kill, the more enemies we create from their aggrieved friends and relatives. He writes that the American military tradition “tends to neglect the lesson...that the way to defeat an insurgency campaign is not to attack the enemy but instead to protect and win over the people.”
In The Gamble, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chronicles America’s attempt to regain the initiative instead of simply conceding defeat and going home. Ricks argues that the Iraq war was wrong in both concept and execution. Combining “overoptimism with ineptitude,” he writes, the administration had begun with the lofty goal of transforming Iraq into a Western-style democracy. By late 2005, none of the original justifications for the war had been borne out—that it would be “quick, easy, cheap, and catalytic.” The U.S. was close to losing, even in the estimation of the Bush administration. The words of one enlisted soldier evoke the sense of drift: “Honestly, it feels like we’re driving around waiting to get blown up.”
In 2006 the Bush administration turned to Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to execute a “new, more effective strategy built around protecting the Iraqi people.” Petraeus had been “unquestionably successful” commanding a division in the invasion and in the year that followed. One of his prime directives to his troops had been to avoid creating more enemies than they killed. Until 2006, the Americans stayed in large well protected bases from which they sent out patrols in armored vehicles. Under the new strategy, troops were sent into the cities to live among the local citizenry. American casualties would surely rise in the short term, but we hoped Iraqi deaths would fall.
A few generals such as Petraeus heeded the advice of Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen that the best way to fight counterinsurgents was not to kill them but to make them irrelevant. Petraeus argued for a surge in U.S. forces as part of a change in both goals and strategy—our troops would get out of the large bases and into the cities—out of their humvees and onto their feet, the better to connect with and protect the local population. To earn credibility and trust, the military had to prove itself as protector instead of as occupier, even if it meant a temporary spike in its own casualties. U.S. goals had to be scaled downward to providing security and stability for Iraq.
The Gamble is a thoroughly researched and highly readable account of the war’s transformation that is sure to enhance the thoughtful reader’s opinion of the American military, but it’s far from the last word on the war. “When will it end?” is a common question for which there is no good answer. Perhaps, Ricks speculates, the answer is that it won’t end. In any case, history will record this as our longest war, probably by far. Indeed, he argues that the most significant event in the entire war almost certainly hasn’t happened yet and is thus far unforeseeable.
Meanwhile, we need to be smarter getting out—assuming we ever do get out—than we were getting in. In Kilcullen’s words, “Just because you invade a country stupidly doesn’t mean you have to leave it stupidly.”
But will Iraq implode when and if we leave? Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has stopped fighting us for now, and may be lying low until the U.S. leaves the scene. At that point, the vicious Shia-Sunni violence could erupt into a full-blown civil war.
Politicians have debated the effectiveness of the surge. Ricks writes that the overall violence has diminished, but whether the surge has succeeded depends on what the goals were in the first place. U.S. forces have regained the initiative and in the process enhanced the safety of the populace for the time being, although the surge is not the only factor. Sunnis awoke to the suffering that al-Qaeda inflicted on them daily and began cooperating with the Americans. The “Sunni awakening” combined with the surge to stem the prospect of failure and defeat.
By succeeding tactically in the surge, Petraeus may have prolonged the war and provided temporary security for the Iraqis, Ricks states, “but not the clear political breakthrough that would have meant unambiguous strategic success.”
Ricks bases The Gamble on extensive interviews with many major participants in the war effort, as well as with a number of enlisted personnel. He provides readers with a vivid profile of Petraeus and a strong, thoughtful assessment of where the general has taken us—mainly, Ricks appears to believe, for the better. Unfortunately, he thinks the surge may be only the middle chapter in the final history of the war.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novels, When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky, have received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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