I. The Locust Years

Among the most corrosive public debates of American history must be that over the Iraq War. Unlike so many other wrenching questions that seized the national attention, it has no resolution, and no definitively right or wrong side. (Contrast with, say, slavery, isolationism, or the equal-rights amendment, all with moral or pragmatic winners and losers.) In this, it is distressingly similar to the long war of the prior generation, in Vietnam. The parallel is limited, though: not least because comfortable collegians are not being forced to go fight (the observation that Vietnam-era protest ended when the draft did is not original to me), and hence social discord has been comparatively muted.

Policy and ideological discord have raged nonetheless, and there are many actors to blame for it. First among them must be President George W. Bush. No assessment of the Iraq War can fail to note his leadership failures in building the case for war — which is now barely recognizable from its 2003 incarnation — and in pursuing the war for its first several years. The crumbling Iraq from the March 2003 invasion through the beginning of 2007 is rightly remembered by nearly all parties (excepting, perhaps, the hard core of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s faithful) as a dark and bloody time. This was the era of the aimless war, punctuated by epic battles in which U.S. Marines fought Iranian “volunteers” in Najaf, and American soldiers subdued Fallujah with artillery and infantry — even as Iraq at large descended ever further into an abyss of anarchic barbarism.

The curious feature of these years, from a policy perspective, was how inconsequential this litany of failure was to the American military and political leadership. Not that they did not preoccupy themselves with Iraq, for they assuredly did: but the outcomes of their actions appeared to not reflect upon them at all. General Tommy Franks, General Ricardo Sanchez, General George Casey, General Peter Pace: these men were but the top tier of senior military leadership whom nearly four years of creeping failure could neither topple nor harm. This professional invulnerability was deeply damaging to morale on the battlefield, where consequences are often fatal, and damaging to the credibility of the war’s proponents at home. As LTC Paul Yingling wrote in a critical May 2007 piece in Armed Forces Journal, “As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

Iraq today is not the Iraq of the 2006 nadir. American deaths are at their lowest level ever — roughly 16 a month since October — and 2008 saw the number of combat deaths drop to a third of the previous year’s level, and the lowest level since the war began. It is even possible for an oddball Italian tourist to show up unescorted in Fallujah, as one did last month, and live to tell the tale.

How Iraq, the U.S. military leadership, and the American civilian war leadership changed for the better are the subjects of Thomas Ricks’s outstanding and eminently readable new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. Ricks, who serves as the Washington Post’s military-affairs correspondent, has covered this territory before — notably in 2007’s Fiasco, to which The Gamble serves as sequel. Though Ricks could not know it at the writing, Fiasco ends up serving as a classic part-one setup: its villains get their comeuppance in the new book, and its emerging heroes triumph, after a fashion, as well.

II. Heroes, Villains, and Prodigals

It’s no surprise that the hopeful figure of Fiasco becomes the central figure of The Gamble. General David Petraeus was the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division in the first half of the Iraq War, and as The Gamble opens, we find him back in the United States, where he directs the re-drafting of the U.S. Army’s counterinsurgency manual (eventually issued as Army Field Manual 3-24 in December 2006), and watches from afar as his former division’s area of operations around Mosul disintegrates into a hotbed of terror and guerrilla war. Ricks played no small part in introducing Petraeus to the American media, long before the latter became a central figure in the public debate around the war — and it’s fortunate for the author that the general rose as he did.

As the hopeful figure is predictable, so are the ersatz villains of Ricks’s narrative. The story of Iraq in 2007 and beyond is the story of the surge and its consequences. Yet for all its seeming common sense now, the surge was opposed by nearly the whole of the U.S. defense apparatus, civilian and military, down to the senior operational commanders in Iraq itself. (I also opposed it, on the grounds — shared by Ricks — that it would accomplish little: happily, we were wrong.) A major reason for reading The Gamble is its recounting of just how the surge was implemented despite this tremendous opposition, which included then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Pace, former MNF-Iraq commander General Casey, and nearly every other person of consequence in the chain of command. These men would not shift from the strategies and tactics of the failed first three years of the Iraq War, either through inertia, or unwillingness to admit error. Among other things, The Gamble is a damning exposition of their place in history — particularly for Pace, who comes off as one of the worst wartime Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs in history — and it will require a substantive revisionist work to shift them from the niche into which Ricks places them.

Beyond the hero and the villains, perhaps most intriguing figures of The Gamble are the transitional figures: the men who, having contributed to the maelstrom of Iraq, redeem themselves by acceding to reality and changing their ways. First among them in the book’s narrative are Fred Kagan and the American Enterprise Institute, both of whom have received a fair share of derision in the media and policy communities, as “neoconservative” persons and entities that helped create the Iraq debacle. Such as this is, in The Gamble we see Kagan and AEI sound the alarm on a failed policy, and put into motion a wargame to devise a winning strategy in Iraq. The role that Kagan plays in winning over the civilian leadership, including the President and Vice President, to the surge must count as a public service of inestimable value.

Second in the book’s narrative of transitional figures is General Raymond Odierno. General Odierno is now the MNF-Iraq commander, having succeeded General Petraeus when the latter took over Central Command in September 2008. Before that, he was Petraeus’s senior deputy in Iraq, overseeing the day-to-day implementation of the surge, and rightly receiving much credit for its success. Yet before this, Odierno’s leadership of the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq was nearly the opposite of Petraeus’s leadership of the 101st. Where Petraeus fostered a cooperative climate in his area of responsibility in Mosul, Odierno’s 4th ID helped spur the Sunni insurgency with harsh tactics, indiscriminate sweeps, and blundering application of firepower. (Fiasco explores this record in appalling detail.) A more unlikely convert to smart counterinsurgency could not be found, but in The Gamble we see Odierno as a microcosm of the Army at large: stepping back from a failing endeavor, and adapting appropriately. It is to his credit, and Ricks, who surely could be more grudging, gives him his due.

The most surprising — and least discussed — transitional figure in The Gamble is President George W. Bush. It’s no secret that the President was tightly bound to the persons and policies he chose to trust: a sometime virtue that became, in war, too often a flaw. In this light, his decision to support the surge over the record of his own leadership, the advice of his entire uniformed military leadership (excepting Petraeus himself), and his outgoing Secretary of Defense was a profound departure from expectations. Yet once he did shift course, he adhered to it with the same tenacity with which he pursued his previous strategy. As Ricks notes, it is certainly easy and even right to fault Bush for taking three years to get things right — but he was ahead of the actual leadership of the U.S. armed forces when he did. Ricks (who is, it should be noted, no Republican) also allows the reader a glimpse into the private conduct of the former President, who comes across as more than the incurious mouthpiece of popular media portrayals. “In these meetings [on Iraq strategy,]” Ricks reports one Army officer saying, “he is masterful — good political insights, good handle on the subject.” Among The Gamble’s many contributions to the history of this era must be a credit to George W. Bush, who got so many things wrong, but got this one big thing right.

III. Obama’s War

The Gamble’s final chapter is entitled “Obama’s War,” and though technically true, it is something of a misnomer. Obama never supported this war, and he does not now, even if seeks to do right by the lights of his Presidential duties. The nature of the Democrats’ relationship with the Iraq War is one of this book’s signal contributions to the history of the present. That it comes from an author who shares most of the Democrats’ policy reflexes only makes it the more credible.

Among the most riveting and regrettable tales in the book is that of the epic September 2007 confrontation between General Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker on the one hand, and the Congressional Democrats on the other. Ricks lays bare the failings of the latter with unflinching clarity. Jaded by years of overoptimistic pronouncements from Administration officials, and egged on by the left wing of their own party, they did not trouble themselves to consider the data presented by Petraeus and Crocker: indeed, the consensus was to reject both men’s testimony before it was presented. The Democratic presidential aspirants were notable in their behavior. Barack Obama used his allotted time for questions to issue a statement that ran over time. (Petraeus and Crocker would later use a private briefing in Baghdad to respond.) Hillary Clinton, whom Petraeus had taken the time to closely inform over the previous several months, repaid the General’s solicitude by obliquely accusing him of dishonesty in her own statement.

As Ricks notes, the Democrats wanted it both ways: they wanted to end the war in Iraq, and be seen as ending it — but they wanted no responsibility for the consequences. Thus the posturing of Obama, Clinton, and their colleagues; and thus the political window for the surge to happen at all. They assumed it would fail, so why block it, lest they be accused of an error of omission? The irony is that, having succeeded in the mid-term — though assuredly not the long term — the consequences of the surge now allow President Obama to reap political capital from withdrawing from Iraq exactly as he would wish, with no immediate prospect of a horrifying, violent denouement a la Southeast Asia following the American withdrawal there. Moreover, as we have seen in the past week, he will withdraw from Iraq to pursue a strategy in Afghanistan that is explicitly modeled on the very surge he opposed, which saved the war he opposed.

This is high praise and the audacity of hope both, but it also misunderstands what the surge was, what it did, and what it failed to do. The surge was a fundamental redirection of tactics and strategy both, not simply an increase in troop numbers for its own sake. (Rumsfeld has rather disingenuously pointed out that he twice increased troop numbers to surge levels, but he neglects to note that they were nearly all on large bases, useless for proper counterinsurgency.) Unless that wholesale shift is reflected in Afghanistan, where large NATO contingents complicate operational matters, the surge there will be a surge in name only. Furthermore, as Ricks is at pains to emphasize, the improvements in Iraq are exceedingly fragile: the necessary political progress has not happened. Kurdish claims in the north remain unresolved, the Sunni reconciliation remains tenuous, and Shi’a politics remain afflicted by gangsterism, conspiratorial habits, and Iranian influence. Iraq looks good now only in comparison to how Iraq looked a short while ago. It is still an impoverished, violence-prone, semi-anarchic weak state — and pulling out much of the massive American army there, the central pillar of what order it has, is a tremendous risk.

“I worry,” writes Ricks near The Gamble’s end, “that there is more to come [in Iraq] than any of us expect. This is a concern I heard expressed much more often by American officials in Baghdad than in Washington, D.C.” That’s not going to change any time soon. With the President focusing upon the war he wants instead of the wars he has, and with American media mostly ignoring the hard-won and exceedingly tentative gains in Iraq, the best we may hope for is that The Gamble does not become a document of what we had, and lost.

Joshua Treviño is the President of Treviño Strategies and Media, Inc.

This article was originally published at The New Ledger.