The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 - Hardcover

Ricks, Thomas E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594201978 ISBN 13: 9781594201974

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2009

Synopsis

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 account, 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.”

About this title

About the Author

Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S. military since 2000. Until the end of 1999, he held the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Making the Corps and A Soldier's Duty.

Reviews

By 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.
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*Starred Review* Fiasco (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.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594201978
• ISBN 13: 9781594201974
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400