Ricks’s Gamble: An overdue review

Note: This was written in the summer of 2008.

If you’re looking for a book that’s going to get into the nitty-gritty into the later stages of the Iraq war, you can’t do any better than The Gamble by Pulitzer-prize winner Tom Ricks.

The Gamble picks up where Ricks’s first book Fiasco left off: late 2005 and early 2006, which marked the abyss of America’s mission in Iraq.

Ricks walks us through how a change in fundamental military strategy—shifting from a low risk to a high risk mission mentality, moving troops from the hulking and fortress-like Forward Operating Bases out into smaller camps amongst the Iraqi population, and changing the military’s ultimate goal from protecting the American soldier to protecting the Iraqi civilian—led to a staggering decrease in violence and death in Iraq shortly after its implementation.

Indeed, “the gamble” was the U.S. Military’s collective decision to put the ball in the hands of Petraeus at a moment when all seemed lost.

What’s most striking and effective about The Gamble is its portrayal of the execution of the Iraq war before Petraeus took over. A drifting mission, plummeting morale amongst the troops, no clear goals, tragic levels of violence, a simmering civil war, insurgency on the rise, all while the Bush Administration ‘papered over’, as Ricks likes to say, the real situation.

Men such as General Tommy Franks, General Ricardo Sanchez, and former D.o.D. head Donald Rumsfeld are the obvious villains—men trying to wage an intransigently conventional war in the heart of Iraq against a particularly non-conventional enemy.

General David Petraeus, General Ray Odierno, current D.o.D. head Bob Gates, and military advisor David Kilcullen play the roles of saviors who go out on a limb and transform America’s mission by placing COIN (counter-insurgency) at the heart of the military’s actions.

What’s fascinating, and incredibly impressive, is how well Petraeus and crew were able to operationalize the new COIN doctrine over the course of 2006 and 2007, bringing violence down by many orders of magnitude.

These men were tasked with nothing less than saving America’s war effort. Tactically, one could say they succeeded. Iraq is still a disaster zone, but it’s far safer than it was a few years ago. Life goes on.

The book does a great job of explaining what the surge actually was—more of a difference in how troops were used than the increase in their quantity. And this shift in troop rationale and behavior provided the crux on which the fortunes of the war turned.

Obviously, a change in American military thinking wasn’t the only thing contributing to the reduction in violence in Iraq. Equally important, argue others, was the decision to “work with” [a euphemism for bribe] Sunni insurgents and tribes by adding them to the U.S. military on a payroll to work against al-Qaeda—this being the  Sunni Awakening, which spawned the famous Sons of Iraq program (a decision which is now backfiring combustibly as this 100,000-strong Sunni armed force opposes the primarily Shi’a Iraqi National Army). Also crucial was the truce with Moqtada al-Sadr, who ordered the legions of Iraqi Shi’a loyal to his command to cease their insurgency against the American occupiers.

The first three quarters of The Gamble builds up the incredible success that followed these developments, swinging from the Rumsfeldian abyss of 2003-2006 and exposing you to the light—the prudent, informed, cautious, and brilliant way that Petraeus and Co. acted in Iraq afterwards.

What’s heartbreaking is that even with these geniuses in charge—even when we do COIN the right way—we can’t achieve political success in Iraq.

Tactically, the surge, and Petraeus’s actions, worked perfectly. But strategically, our soldiers were not able to spur the political reconciliation and progress as planned—even with the help of external organic factors such as the Sunni Awakening and the Sadr truce.

This conclusion—that our strategy, even in the hands of the most wise and capable, failed—should serve to correct any sunny optimism built up in the beginnings of the book with regard to America’s ability to develop the world.

It’s important to understand how we were able to bring Iraq back from the brink of chaos, but even more important is to understand that we weren’t—and won’t be—able to transform Saddam’s Iraq into a peaceful, constitutionally democratic, human rights-respecting ally of the United States and Israel.

This expectation was outrageous and, as the war has proven, deadly on a massive scale.

It’s reassuring to watch our military brilliantly adapt to its surroundings—but it’s also slippery slope. Why can’t we just solve all the world’s problems with serious COIN campaigns?

As Iraq has shown, we can’t. Some situations are beyond our control.

Republicans have much work to do

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The picture, taken from a recent Gallup study,  says it all. 

Nate Silver qualifies the apparent existence of only five red states here. 

I would add that, if I were a partisan Republican, I wouldn’t be too worried about Democrats taking Kansas or the Dakotas either. Still, that small raft of red in a giant sea of blue must be disconcerting.

My esteemed colleague–you have, then, much work to do in the next few years. An enormous shift in demographic and cultural targeting would seem to predicate any Republican victories. Recent immigants, minorities, the youth, the poor…can you refashion the current Republican message—namely its xenophobia, rigid social conservatism, and trickle-down economic philosophy— to capture these demographics?

Or do you think you can win by doubling  down?

Hugh Hewitt v. Glenn Greenwald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’ve got to take a look at this.

Kudos to Hewitt for inviting Greenwald onto his show. Their discussion—on Gaza, American foreign policy, the costs of war, and moral equivalency—is both civil and significant. 

It’s the kind of debate I wish I heard more often. 

Obviously I side more toward Greenwald on this point—in that I think that Israel’s current bombardment and invasion of Gaza isn’t going to increase their security in the medium to long term—but I do understand what Hewitt is trying to say. 

What else can Israel do? It’s citizens are in a state of siege, which obviously isn’t acceptable. Should it just let the rockets rain down?

I go with Greenwald on the answer: “It’s not just a one-sided question, which is what should the Israelis do about rocket fire, the question also is what should the Palestinians do about the fact that they’re essentially occupied for a foreign army for four decades, and have walls built around them, and blockades imposed on them. And I think all these issues need to be resolved in order to have a real resolution. I think dropping bombs in a densely populated civilian area like the Gaza Strip isn’t going to solve any of it. It’s just going to exacerbate it.”

If Israel eradicates Hamas, what’s going to fill the vacuum? As Greenwald says, certainly not a moderate and peaceful political party. More likely an even more implacable and violent extremist paramilitary-terrorist group. 

In the long term the only way for Israelis to be safe is to be at peace with their neighbors. And that’s going to require marginalization of the terrorist groups that haunt its borders. Which can only be achieved by giving the moderate Palestinians, the average Palestinians–the ones who want to achieve their goals through non-violent means–a viable and developable territory. Settlements will have to be pulled back out of the West Bank and the socio-economic barriers that criss-cross Palestinian territory will have to be taken down.

Unless some serious steps are taken in this direction, there’s no reason to believe that the current on-off warfare won’t continue to escalate and take an even deadlier toll on both sides.

The Forever War

I just finished The Forever War, a enthralling collection of memoirs and reporting sown together from Dexter Filkins’s audacious journeys to Afghanistan, Ground Zero, and Iraq. It’s a spectacular work. His style of writing alone makes the book worth the read–stream of consciousness at its best. It’s hard to put down.

Filkins, a writer for both the LA and NY Times, provides keen insight into the cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan on the most basic level of individual interaction. He, dangerously, goes off the beaten path and engages Afghanis and Iraqis in fascination conversation that reveals much about their sentiments toward war and the United States. He brings us into the world of shape-shifting loyalties…soldiers in Afghanistan who fight for the Taliban one day and join the Northern Alliance on the next; of grotesque destruction…spinal cords strewn across the rubble of the Twin Towers; and of the eerie stratification of Baghdad, where concrete blast walls separate families and suicide bombers lurk around every corner.

Filkins is an insanely intrepid reporter, and in the course of the book, he dodges more sniper bullets and IEDs than I’d care to count. He nearly gets kidnapped and murdered on several occasions, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And most courageously of all, he travels to meet the parents of the soldier who was murdered by an insurgent while trying to bring Filkins and his photographer in for a closer shot.

This is not a glass half-full book. It is instead a bleak portrait of the heartbreaking tragedy that has unfolded over the last decade in the Middle East.

Filkins shows the barbarism of the Taliban and of Saddam in stark light–you can’t come away from his book thinking anything but the worst of these two odious regimes. However, he also paints the undeniable tragedy of war and anarchy–the gratuitous loss of life, destruction of society, and civil strife that followed our invasions.

Filkins finds many Iraqis who struggle to say whether they are better off today than under Saddam. Some question the value of the new civil and political freedoms that have arrived without security and basic necessities such as electricity and water. Others point to the growing role of Islam in public affairs across the South of the country, and argue that this is—like Saddam’s rule—stripping them of their civil and political freedoms. At this point, it is far from clear whether the average Iraqi is better off today than under Saddam’s regime. And even if a peaceful democracy develops somewhere down the road, was it worth the hell of the last five years? Was it worth destroying a country? Was it worth the loss of 4,216 Americans? Filkins makes it hard to say yes, but does an admirable job of not saying no and leaving it up to the reader.

I personally find it impossible to believe that taking out Saddam was worth the havoc, violence, and aggravated ethnic conflict that has ensued since April of 2003. To paraphrase George Packer, war is too blunt an instrument to be wielded when the chances of success are so slight.

Surprisingly, The Forever War makes me even less confident of our mission in Afghanistan–a mission that grew from uprooting al Qaeda into destroying the Taliban and installing a Western democracy. According to an article Filkins wrote just yesterday, the Taliban have established a permanent presence in 72% of Afghanistan, up from 54% a year ago. These guys are tough sons of bitches, and they aren’t going away, even after seven years of a global campaign to defeat them. The American-backed Afghani government has little authority outside of the major cities–a serious problem in a country where the overwhelming majority of 32 million lives in rural areas. It looks like when we eventually withdraw from Afghanistan, the Taliban may be no less in control than when we first went in. And Bin Laden and Zawahiri remain on the lam. If not a total foreign policy disaster, then certainly a waste of 623 American lives.

Besides reminding us of the awful toll of war itself, Filkins’s work serves to illustrate just how hard it is to shape the Muslim world into something of our own liking. Again, The Forever War is not light reading, but you should read it all the same.

Disingenuous talking points

I had originally read this piece by Ed Gillespie with a mix of amazement and disgust.

Most of my disgust was directed toward his rebuttal of the commonly known fact that “the war in Iraq caused us to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and al Qaeda.” In his attempt to undermine the truth for political purposes, he tries to conflate Iraq with Afghanistan, by saying that they are “two fronts in the same war.” He fails to mention that there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded. How can one be so blind to this reality? Many apologists for the war continue to say that we’ve done good work in rooting out al Qaeda from their outposts in the Sunni Triangle. How is it good work if we haven’t even yet completely destroyed the monster which didn’t exist before we created it? Once al Qaeda is gone from Iraq, we will be back to square one, but that won’t amount to “good work.”

Matt Yglesias points out an even worse talking point of Gillespie’s, though—one that I’ve seen far too many times:

“And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.”

I can’t respond to this any better than Yglesias, so I’ll just post his riposte here:

“This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. The vast majority of Americans to have ever been killed by foreign terrorists were killed under George W. Bush’s watch. As Gillespie says, whether or not a president succeeds in preventing foreign terrorists from murdering thousands of American citizens is an important part of that president’s record. And Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.”

Who’s a bigger planner?

So you’re arguing that Obama will lean more toward “planning justice and order” than Bush did.

I’d say there is a multi-dimensional answer to which way Obama will lean–it’s not categorical.

Domestically, I agree with you–he will lean more toward “planning” than the Bush Administration.

The de-regulatory, “hands-off”, inactive approach toward managing our economy failed miserably during the Bush years. The “hands-off” approach to Katrina was an even graver tragedy. And some argue that the government didn’t pay enough attention to evolving our energy economy or overseeing our public schools. Obama will certainly push for a more “hands-on” approach for these and other issues here at home.

Internationally, however, Obama will take a strong step back from where Bush stood on “planning justice and order.” We will not be invading any additional countries in an attempt to restructure them as secular market democracies. The excesses of hubris and quixotic idealism that led us to try this in Iraq will be flushed away in the Obama administration.

Bush’s Whimper to Be Followed by Barack’s Bang

Great observation from Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, concerning Obama’s blank check courtesy of not only the voters, but the Bush administration.

The quietly brilliant quadriplegic writes:

“On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president — who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in — to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

“Don’t be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn’t get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.”

Culd the tug of war be over? It appears that the end of Consitutional restraint originated with a whimper from Bush’s last days, but it will surely be followed with a bang by the Obama administration.

it’s alive?

It’s been an incredibly busy month, professionally, for the both of us. But we’re going to try and bring this thing back from the grave.

One thing I did do during the past month was read Niebuhr’s Irony of American History.

You should all read it. It is a stunning work.

Here’s a quote–let’s discuss:

“The controversy between those who would “plan” justice and order and those who trust in freedom to establish both is an irresolvable one. Every healthy society will live in the tension of that controversy until the end of history; and will prove its health by preventing either side from gaining complete victory.”

why Milo isn’t Obama

 

So on one hand, if you were under the rule of Milo Minderbinder, you either gave him all your money in order to eat or else you starved.

On the other, if you were under the rule of Barack Obama, either you give the government all your money in order to build a coal plant or else you starved.

Except that you didn’t starve… because in reality you chose to not build a traditional coal-powered plant.

You could have designed and built a clean-coal plant, which doesn’t pollute as much. Or a liquid coal plant. But these were extremely expensive options.

So then instead you might have been encouraged to build a solar farm, or a wind farm. Or you could figure out a way to generate energy through demand-response techniques.

But what you ended up doing was investing in an electric car that you were able to power via wind and solar technologies installed on your roof, creating a system where you didn’t have to use transportation fuel or grid electricity at all. You simultaneously reduced your dependence on foreign oil while also reducing your output of pollutants.

Which was basically the coolest thing you’ve ever done.

And in all seriousness, I don’t see any similarities at all here. You’ve got Milo, motivated by pure cupidity.

On the other hand, you’ve got Obama, who is motivated by a desire to put a price on pollution so that our air will be a bit cleaner, so that those of us who have asthma won’t suffer as badly, so that there won’t be as much acid rain so that our infrastructure will last longer, so that we won’t contract lung disease as easily, etc.

How is personal greed similar to wanting to put a price on negative externalities so that together as a nation we’ll innovate and create new kinds of energy production that don’t pollute so that our countrymen don’t have to suffer because of silly and backwards coal-fired plants?

“Obama the Militant”

Hey all,

I am back from a week long hiatus (it did not have anything to do with the outcome of the election, as my colleague would have you believe).

Anyway, I just recently finished reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (remarkable book, anti-war though it may be). I could not help but notice the similarities between Barack Obama’s position on coal and cunning entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder’s worldview, embodied in a chapter entitled “Milo the Militant.”

The words speak for themselves:
“(Milo) then raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative–there was an alternative, of course, since Milo detested coercion and was a VOCAL champion of freedom of choice–was to starve” (emphasis added).

And Obama:
“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”