Thomas E. Ricks, "The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008"
The Penguin Press | 2009 | ISBN: 1594201978 | 430 pages | siPDF | 8.5 MB
Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq—
The Gamble is the next news breaking installment.
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.”
Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best of the Month, February 2009: Anyone who read
Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks's superb, bestselling account of the Iraq War through 2005, and has followed the war since has likely noticed that many of the heroes of that devastating book, the officers and analysts who seemed to understand what was going wrong in the war when the rest of the political and military leadership didn't, have since been put in charge, starting with General David Petraeus, the cerebral officer who took command in Iraq and led what became known as "the surge."
Ricks, the senior Pentagon correspondent at the
Washington Post, has stayed on the story, and he returns with his second book on the war,
The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. As good (and influential) as
Fiasco was,
The Gamble may be even better, telling the remarkable story of how a few people inside and outside the Pentagon pushed the new strategy through against opposition across the political spectrum and throughout the military top brass, and then, even more remarkably, how soldiers put the difficult plan into action on the ground and managed to sharply reduce the chaotic violence in Iraq.
But the story doesn't end there, and Ricks's bracing conclusion—that the American military, like it or not, will still have a necessary role in Iraq for years to come—makes it likely that this may not be the last book we have from him on the subject.
From Bookmarks MagazineBy and large, critics were less eager to assess Ricks's work as an author and more interested in his opinions about the success of the "surge" and the future of Iraq. But this is perhaps the book's greatest endorsement; whether they were liberal or conservative, American or British, critics viewed Ricks's facts as unassailable and his analysis as strong. They were impressed not just with his unparalleled access to the main actors in Iraq but also with his ability to integrate two commonly held but seemingly irreconcilable views—that the war was a mistake and a catastrophe (as expressed in
Fiasco) and that Petraeus and the surge represented an amazing turnaround. Thus, many critics found that although Ricks seems to express a consensus view,
The Gamble is counterintuitive and challenging, refreshing yet sobering.
From BooklistFiasco (2006), Ricks’ best-selling book about the Iraq War, dissected what went wrong. Now he explains how things began to go right.
Beginning in late 2005, when the war seemed lost, he offers a compelling overview of the situation as it went forward; thanks to extensive interviews with the military principals, State Department officials, and others, there is copious detail on the rationales behind new strategies.
Combining a nonfiction writer’s ability to synthesize masses of facts with a storyteller’s gift for narrative, Ricks shows that it was three men—retired general Jack Keene, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, and General David Petraeus—who, in essence, went around the chain of command to put the pieces for the “surge“ in place. These three assume the depth and texture of fictional characters in Ricks’ telling. We learn that Odierno and those under his command had the reputation of being so ham-fisted in their dealings with Iraqi civilians that they routinely turned them into insurgents. Taking Odierno’s eventual turnaround as a microcosm of what happened on the ground, Ricks carefully charts why the surge worked as well as it did.
Still, his conclusions about Iraq as a whole are sobering. As the last chapter of the book details, he predicts not only that the war will go on and on but that, in fact, the most important events in the conflict have yet to occur. The Iraqis themselves, Ricks reports, are not optimistic about the future, either. As one police officer in Fallujah, who came over to the American side, puts it, “No democracy in Iraq. Ever.”
ContentsMaps
Cast of Characters
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Photos
Part One: The Old War Ends [1]
1 Things Fall Apart (Fall 2005) [3]
Lost and Adrift
Gen. David Petraeus
2 How To Fight This War (Fall 2005–Fall 2006) [24]
"A C-130 Into Hell"
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Retired Generals vs. "The Decider"
A Missed Chance at Camp David
The Battle of Baghdad Begins
"Forward" Into Failure
Washington Winces
A Light in Ramadi
A Run in October
3 Keane Takes Command (Fall 2006) [74]
The Triumph of the Democrats
Big Jack Keane Intervenes
"Dave, You're Shot"
Keane on the Warpath
Grading the Chairman
Keane and Odierno vs. The World
One Weekend at AEI Changes the War
Bush Gets Both Barrels
The Council of Colonels Unloads
Saddam in the Air
4 A Strategy Is Born (Winter 2006–7) [106]
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno
WWSHD?
Bush Rises to the Occasion
Part Two: A New War Begins [125]
5 If You're So Smart... (Spring 2007) [127]
Into the "Ghost Town"
The Odd Couple
The Petraeus Brain Trust
Listening to Foreigners
Sadi Othman
Emma Sky
Time Waits for No One
6 Gambling On A "Shitty Hand" (Spring and Summer 2007) [149]
Petraeus Amid the Pessimists
"The Mesopotamian Stampede"
Smaller Goals...
...And Bigger Risks
A Foundation for Strategy
The Hardest Step
The Enemy Counterattack
The Battle of Tarmiyah
Black Thursday
Dead Man with an Ipod
A Slow Turning
Counterinsurgency Inside the Prison Camps
Surging the Iraqis
Finished Business
7 Signs Of Life In Baghdad (Summer 2007) [200]
A Separate Peace
Getting to Know You
The Insurgent Who Loved Titanic
Army 2006 vs. Army 2007
The General Who Loved Gertrude Bell
A Balanced Strategy
Baghdad Saturday Nights
8 The Domestic Opposition Collapses (Summer and Fall 2007) [228]
An Admiral in the Hallway
Success on the Battlefield
Petraeus vs. the Congress
"Hey, We Won!"
America Tunes Out the War
Part Three: War Without End [257]
9 The Twilight Zone (Winter 2007–8) [259]
Revisiting a Strategic Assumption
Time for Maliki to Go?
The Sunni Side of the Street
The Once and Future Sadr
The American Militia: Friends or Foes?
From Berlin to Baghdad
10 Big Wasta (Spring 2008) [273]
Fallon Out, Petraeus People Up
"March Madness"
Maliki: From Overwhelmed to Overconfident?
Round II with Congress: No Way Out
Drawdown
11 After The Surge (Summer 2008) [294]
The Surge Falls Short
Obama in Iraq
Petraeus Out of Iraq
Surprises at Home
A Frayed Military
12 Obama's War (Fall 2008) [306]
A New Campaign
Epilogue: The Long War [313]
At the End of the Rainbow?
What Have We Done?
Tehran on Top?
Waiting for Saddam?
How Does This End?
Appendixes [327]
A Col Devlin's Intelligence Assessment [331]
B The Orders Lt. Gen. Odierno Received in December 2006 [337]
C How Odierno Changed the Mission [343]
D Gen. Petraeus Summarizes How to Operate in Iraq [369]
Notes [373]
Acknowledgments [383]
Index [385] |
Tags: WorldPolitics, MiddleEast, Iraq, MilitaryHistory
