Surge Overkill

I loved (in the sense that you could love something so bleak and utterly devoid of hope) Thomas Ricks' Pulitzer Prize winning book, Fiasco, about the planning, selling, and "execution" of the Iraq war between 2002 and 2005. It was thorough and humane and technical and scathing. It richly deserved its plaudits, especially in those dark and chaotic days of the Iraq war in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

So now Ricks has a new book out about the Iraq war following immediately from Fiasco. It is called The Gamble, and it is largely about the 'surge.'

But what is/was the surge?

It turns out the surge was really three distinct things orchestrated to happen at once. The first, and most familiar, was the increase in troop levels inside Iraq by roughly 30,000 men and women. the second was a complete reset of the American strategy in Iraq, led by Generals Odierno and Petraeus over the objections of almost everyone who had any say in the affairs of the United States Military. The third was the so called 'Sunni Awakening' which was, in point of fact, a billions of dollars effort to pay the Sunni insurgency to stop killing Americans and start killing Al Qaeda.

The most striking, perhaps, was the strategic shift.

Petraeus was an advocate of the polar opposite of the sort of war Donald Rumsfeld wanted to have. Rather than going small and fast and hard, Petraeus wanted to go big and long and slow. Petraeus wanted to fight the war in the way that counter insurgencies have been fought a dozen times before in and by other nations. Basically, he wanted the Americans to protect the people of Iraq, earn their trust, live among them, and damn everything else until the Iraqis settled down, trusted the United States and got on with the business of a relatively stable nation.

Much of Ricks' book is about the month to month metrics of the surge and the constant fight within the policy arms of the government to keep it going. For most of the book we are meant to feel that the surge is a qualified (though stunning even in its qualifications) success. American deaths in Iraq, after spiking sharply initially, begin to drop. Iraq civilian deaths begin to do the same. Neighborhoods begin to function after a fashion, and American troops begin to recover some of their morale and esprit du corps. But Ricks leaves for the last section of his book the reservations.

Basically, the Americans interposed themselves between the Sunni and Shia factions of a low boiling civil war. Eventually this bore fruit. But what happens when we leave? Moreover, since much of our strategy was arming and funding the very people who were killing us in the war's early years, what would happen to them and their weapons once we were out of the picture? Have we simply created the setting for a more balanced civil war? The object of the surge was meant to be to reduce violence enough for the Iraqi government to come to some kind of reconciliation with its people and begin to take on the responsibilities of securing and providing for its own people, but everyone seems in agreement that this, perhaps the most important aspect of the surge as originally conceived, has been an abject failure.

President Obama has made clear his intentions to draw down American forces to between 35,000 and 50,000 by next August and to remove all troops by 2011, but what we, none of us, know is how Iraq will respond. It may well be that the surge will come to be regarded as an almost mythical success within the armed forces, but it may well equally be that, in hindsight, it looks as though we delayed the inevitable at massive cost to both lives and treasure in order to masturbate with a fundamentally unstable pseudo-nation.

The book itself isn't as engaging a read as its immediate predecessor. It often feels rushed and more like a first draft than a coherent narrative of events. It bounces between so many interviews that say the same things that one is left with the impression that, though Ricks' access seems to have been deep and broad, that there was less of a story than the book set out to tell when it came time to actually write the thing. At times it can be fawning over Petraeus and Odierno (perhaps deservedly) and at other times it can be oddly silent about the world outside the top brass of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Ultimately, what best explains the book and its rambling quality is the final line of the thing itself (I'm paraphrasing):

The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet occurred.

That is the most sobering and resonant moment in the whole book, actually.