Amazon 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 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 sition across the political spectrum and
throughout the 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 , 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. --Tom Nissley Questions for Thomas E. Ricks
We exchanged emails with Tom Ricks for a few weeks before the
publication of The Gamble, a time which saw, among other things,
the inauguration of Barack Obama and regional elections in Iraq.
You can read the full exchange on the Amazon books blog,
Omnivoracious.com. Here are some highlights:
Amazon.com: The Gamble is the history of what has become known
as "the surge." What do you think the public understands about
the surge, and how does that compare with what you've seen from
up close?
Thomas E. Ricks: I think there are two big misunderstandings
about the surge. The first is that the surge "worked." Yes, it
did, in that it improved security. But it was meant to do more
than that. It was supposed to create a breathing space in which
Iraqi political leaders could move forward. In fact, as General
Odierno says in the book, some used the elbow room to move
backward. The bottom line is that none of the basic problems
facing Iraq have been addressed--the relationship between Shia,
Sunni and Kurds, or who leads the Shias, or the status of the
disputed city of Kirkuk, or the sharing of oil revenue.
The second misunderstanding is just how difficult the surge was.
People back here seem to think that 30,000 troops were added and
everything calmed down. In fact, the first six months of the
surge, from January through early July 2007, were the toughest
months of the war. When troops moved out of their big bases and
into little outposts across Baghdad, they got hammered by bombs
and rockets. It took some time before being among the people
began to lead to improved security, and during that time, a lot
of top American officials in Iraq weren't sure the new approach
was working. General Petraeus says in the book that he looks back
on that time as a "horrific nightmare."
Amazon.com: Let's start with that second point. Because The
Gamble is in many ways the story of a remarkable success: a
minority of officers and analysts who pushed through a new plan
for the war against sition across the political spectrum and
throughout the leadership, and then, even more
impressively, soldiers who put the plan into action on the ground
and managed to stem a great deal of the violence in Iraq within a
matter of months.
The new counterinsurgency approach to the war was one you had
argued for in Fiasco, but in the most violent days of early 2007,
how did you think it was going to turn out?
Ricks: I was very skeptical back in early 2007 about the surge.
I think there were two reasons for this.
First, there was little evidence that the U.S. was
going to be able to operate differently, and more effectively.
After all, they had been fighting there for longer than we fought
in World War II, and the only thing we had to show for it was
that in 2006, Iraq was going straight to hell.
Also, I didn't get out to Iraq in 2007 until May, on the first
trip I did for this book. It was only then, five months into the
surge, when I got on the ground there, that I sensed how
different the American leadership was from earlier on. Everybody,
and I mean everybody, in the U.S. , was talking about
counterinsurgency, and making protecting the Iraqi population
their top priority. That was a huge change from earlier on in the
war, when different units seemed pretty much to do their own
thing--one outfit would be drinking tea with the sheikhs, another
was banging heads.
The new candor and understanding in the Americans was striking.
One that May 2007 trip, I went into Green Zone and got from
David Kilcullen a really thorough and inful briefing into
the state of play in the streets of Baghdad. That was a big
change from earlier on, when officials inside the Zone had no
idea what was happening out there. I remember also one general,
David Fastabend, an advisor to Petraeus, beginning a conversation
then by saying, "We have done some stupid shit" in Iraq. There
clearly was a new gang in town.
Amazon.com: And many of the people who had been put in charge,
Gen. Petraeus first among them, were well known to readers of
Fiasco as advocates for counterinsurgency. But one who wasn't
turns out to be one of the crucial figures in your story: Gen.
Ray Odierno, who early in the war was one of the ones banging
heads. By the time 2007 rolls around, he's Petraeus's top
commander in Iraq and he's a changed leader. What happened to
him?
Ricks: The change in General Odierno is one I wrestled with
throughout the reporting of this book. He seemed so different, so
in sync with Petraeus on the counterinsurgency plan. And he was
of almost no help in figuring it out. "General Odierno, you
strike me as so changed from the guy I wrote about in Fiasco. I
can't figure out how that happened." "Hey Tom: Your problem, not
mine."
I think two major things happened to him between 2004, the end
of his first tour in Iraq, and the end of 2006, when he came back
for his second tour. First, his son was badly wounded in Baghdad,
losing an arm to an RPG. Second, when he came back to Baghdad, he
saw that the place was falling apart, and that the war could be
lost on his watch. That has a way of concentrating the mind.
What he did then was kind of astonishing: He went around his
bosses and basically cooked up the surge. He was the only officer
in the chain of command who was for it. (Petraeus also was for
it, but he hadn't yet arrived in Iraq.) I think he showed genuine
moral courage in what he did. It was a huge risk, going against
all his bosses. As I say in the book, he was the natural her
of the surge, and Petraeus was the adoptive her. I have no
problem saying that General Odierno is one of the heroes of this
book.
Amazon.com: While we're talking about the surge, there's one
basic thing to clarify: despite the name, as you say, "the surge
was more about how to use troops than it was about the number of
them." What did the new counterinsurgency tactics translate into
on the ground, and why do you think they worked to the extent
they did?
Ricks: This is a hugely important question, so I want to take
some time on it.
There were two key aspect to the different use of troops. First,
they had a new top priority: protect Iraqis. (Until February
2007, the top priority of U.S. forces in Iraq was to transition
to Iraqi control.) Second, to do that, they had to move out into
the population. Before this point, they were doing a lot of
patrols from big bases, usually in Humvees. They would be in a
neighborhood maybe one hour a day, and the other 23 hours of the
day belonged to the insurgents. Now, they were living in the
neighborhoods, and constantly going out on short foot patrols.
They got a lot more familiar with the people, often visiting
every single family, and conducting a census. In terms,
they were ping the sea in which the insurgent swam.
Familiarity made them far more effective, and also constrained
the movements of insurgents.
For all that, there are other important factors in why Iraq
changed, and they shouldn't be forgotten. First, by the time the
U.S. moved into the streets of Baghdad, the city was
largely ethnically cleansed. Second, in the spring of 2007, in a
huge policy shift, General Petraeus began putting the Sunni
insurgency on the payroll--essentially paying them not to attack
us. This split them off from al Qaeda in Iraq, and isolated the
terrorist extremists.
Once the Sunni insurgency was seen to be on our side, even
temporarily, the Shiite fighters under Moqtadr al Sadr went to
ground. Otherwise, Uncle Sam would have been training all his
firepower on them.
The problem is that all these arrangements are temporary, and
could easily unravel. For example, the Sunni insurgents made a
separate peace with the United States. They never have given up
their objection to Shiite control of Iraq and of the Iraqi army.
So what we may have done is simply delay that fight--and armed
both sides in the meantime.
