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The Gamble

Tom Ricks, now blogging at Foreign Policy,* has a new one coming out. The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008: 

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.

Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist.

The Gamble offers news breaking information, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates.

For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.”

There’s a teaser. Sounds like it’s worth a read, from the guy who documented the eff-up. Here’s Michael Yon with praise and some intriguing background re Ricks, by the way:

Tom Ricks, the outstanding American journalist who authored Fiasco (a very important book about the Iraq war), spent some of his childhood years in Afghanistan.  Tom emailed me about Afghanistan, saying: “I love the country…”  On another occasion, Tom wrote to me about his childhood here:

“When I was a kid we used to go down to the Helmand for Christmas, stopping in Kandahar for milkshakes at the American USAID outpost there.  It was lovely that time of year. Lashkar Gah was a Little America out in the desert. The big dams north of there were built by the Americans in the ’50s–the subject of James Michner’s novel Caravans.”

(Tom is holed up working on a new book: The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-08, which I am looking forward to reading.)

Prior Ricks:

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005

Making the Corps: 10th Anniversary Edition with a New Afterword by the Author

A Soldier’s Duty: A Novel

* And blogging today in praise of Obama’s really bad multilateralist and engagement ideas for dealing with people who will eat him alive. Putin. The Chinese. Fortunately, Ricks is channeling a Fareed Zakaria interview from last summer, which means it is entirely impossible to tell whether Obama still believes any of this. Since then, Obama’s surrendered to the idea of not surrendering in Iraq, which of course makes fighting and winning in Afghanistan and elsewhere viable, for what it’s worth. Which is to say, for the moment. Since that interview, Obama’s also handed the matters in question and a lot else over to Hillary Clinton, which leaves us with the question of whether, when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary has bigger … never mind.

Topics: Iraq, history, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:52 pm on Monday, January 12, 2009

One Response to “The Gamble”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   January 13th, 2009 at 11:25 am

   Yes. She does.

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