Iraq’s Victories and Defeats — in Washington

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

By Thomas E. Ricks Penguin Press; 384 pages

History is written by the victors, and that’s plainly the case in Tom Ricks’ gritty volume on the surge phase of the Iraq war. Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno are the flawed but authentic heroes who pushed through a strategy to suppress Iraq’s festering civil war; the losers are warlords like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who agitated for the invasion and then lost control over its outcome through naiveté or ineptitude. Much of the Beltway intrigue here was reported by Ricks’ Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward in last year’s The War Within. Military strategies–even successful ones–are, like laws and sausages, not something civilians necessarily want to see made. Still, Ricks’ reporting and insight from the front lines of Iraq support his conclusion that the U.S. is likely to be fighting there until at least 2015. His first book on the war, 2006’s Fiasco, was a bleak tale of martial malfeasance. His second suggests there may be light at the end of the tunnel, but if there is, it’s flickering–and a long way off.

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