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General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
Penguin
February 2009
On Sale: February 10, 2009
400 pages
ISBN: 1594201978
EAN: 9781594201974
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 information,
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.”
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