When any book comes to be as highly praised as Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble, my natural instinct is to start looking for the flaws the praisers are leaving out. And Spencer Ackerman, while not denying the book’s virtues, delivers the goods in his review for The National:
We do not learn from The Gamble what the [...]
When any book comes to be as highly praised as Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble, my natural instinct is to start looking for the flaws the praisers are leaving out. And Spencer Ackerman, while not denying the book’s virtues, delivers the goods in his review for The National:
We do not learn from The Gamble what the Iraqis – or any Iraqi factions – think of the surge. At the beginning of the book, Ricks prints an account of how an Iraqi witness to the 2005 Marine massacre in Haditha viewed the horror. An analogous Iraqi viewpoint might have complemented his description of an initiative known as “gated communities”, in which Petraeus’s subordinates built huge blast walls to separate Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad from Shiite ones. Petraeus meant the barriers to reduce sectarian violence, but Sunni residents of the Adhimiya neighbourhood protested loudly that the US was ghettoising Baghdad. Al Maliki publicly sided with the protesters, but the walls kept going up. Similarly, Odierno recognised that fighting in the “belts” around Baghdad was key to reducing violence inside the city (slyly, Ricks compares him to Saddam Hussein, who adopted a similar strategy). This peri-urban fighting was fierce and sustained, even if it helped protect the population from the insurgency. How did the Iraqis view this predicament? […]
It’s possible that Ricks’s blindness to the SOFA reflects that of his sources. During the month when the SOFA was signed, Odierno tells him, “I would like to see a… force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000” in 2014 or 2015 – years after the SOFA mandates the US must leave. A discomfort with the prospect of US forces leaving Iraq permeates the quotes from Odierno’s deputies. “The American military is trying to persuade the American people that this is going to take a long time,” Odierno aide Maj James Powell says. Emma Sky, a British liberal who improbably serves as Odierno’s political adviser – and who took the job, she says, to see if the US could “exit with some dignity” – tells Ricks: “We have to buy time in the US to complete the mission.” There is no recognition evident in their quotes that it is the Iraqis, not the Americans, who ultimately decide when the mission is completed.
To lean a bit speculatively, but not too much I would say, I think we can conclude that the limits of Ricks’ perspective reflect the limited perspective of his sources—sources within the U.S. military. And that this, in turn, reflects the fairly inherent limits of an imperial enterprise. The American military forces charged with administering Iraq report to politicians in Washington, DC who report to voters and interest-groups scattered throughout the country. Whether or not one acknowledges Iraqi opinion to be, in some sense, the “center of gravity” of one’s counterinsurgency campaign the fact of the matter remains that one’s key bases of support are all back home. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pose a much more credible threat to cut off your supply lines than does the insurgency. Naturally, then, the focus remains to a large extent on sentiment back home.
Meanwhile, for Iraq to be run decently, it’s really necessary that Iraq be run by people who are accountable to Iraqis. Which means that Iraq needs to not be run by foreigners. Which is precisely why Iraqis from across the spectrum were able to unite around the principle that the Americans have to go. And it appears that the new Obama administration recognizes that reality and is planning to leave. And thanks to the security gains associated with the surge, we’ll get to do so with our heads held much higher than they would have been had we started leaving in 2006. But the strategic, human, and material costs of dragging things out have been high and all the successes of the surge period didn’t change the fact that in the end we need to go.
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