I finished Tom Ricks book The Gamble a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been going back and re-reading certain sections to make sure I understand exactly what he was trying to say. Here is my take on the book.
1) At first I was truly worried that Ricks had drunk the Petreaus kool-aid and allowed himself to be swallowed up by the myth that Petreaus can do no wrong-that he single handedy saved the nation of Iraq. It seemed that way to me at first-until I realized that he was pointing out that the decision to surge had many fathers.
2) I think he missed the boat on the disagreements about the surge between the other military leaders and the guys like Petreaus who, in my opinion, went native-worrying not about the cost to the US, but how to make Iraq work. The book makes the rest of the military leadership-particularly Fox Fallon out to be simple minded. I think that misses the point. The question that Fallon was trying to get across before he was squelched-and that Gen Casey and others were voicing in their opposition to he surge-was, “ at what cost does this come?”. Ricks never did an objective analysis of the opportunity cost the US paid in terms of: a) damage to overall military capability, b) decreased freedom of action in other, more important areas and c) whether it was really in our interests to be tied down for a people that still have not demonstrated an ability to take care of themselves.
3) His conclusions about the end arounds required to convince the government to move ahead with the surge are disturbing. If Jack Keane was so hell bent to drive American policy in a particular direction-than he should have taken the Army Chief of Staff’s position when it was offered. Submarining his peers in retirement is unseemly at best, a terrible precedent at worst. Try to imagine this nightmare in a Taiwan scenario: Sestak and Obama-going around Naval Leadership. Its a bad road to go down and we will regret it someday.
I’m also kind of dissapointed that Ricks did not give much play to two other factors that played in the “success” of the surge: the ethnic cleasing of Baghdad was completed-and the Iraqi sheiks themselves had started turning long before troop levels went up. Ricks also says nothing about the fact that Pertreaus was a part of the problem before he became the solution-including passing out Kalsihnikovs like they were candy and paying lots and lots of bribe money for deals that are now starting to come apart.
All in all it is a great book and in his commentaries since, Ricks has pointed out again: just because we try to rectify a mistake after it has been made-does not mean we were somehow right to have made that mistake in the first place. Ricks states emphatically that Iraq will rank as the greatest foreign policy mistake the US has made in 50 years.
Probably the saddest thing is that Ricks is right in his ultimate conclusion-that by executing the surge, without having the Iraqis accomplish the political change necessary, and was the ultimate rationale for the surge- we may have condemned ourselves to never being able to leave.
Which gets back to the question he never really answered-at what cost does that conclusion become too much pay?
Point by point.
1) It’s a no brain answer. The surge was the son of many fathers.
2) This country pays its warriors to win the war. It is the role of politicians to determine if the cost exceeds the national interest. Nobody pays the generals to unilaterally decide that the cost of victory is excessive. What a silly and ridiculous idea. Soldiers have an expectation that their military commanders will fight for victory even if history has always shown that the final determination is always a political decision.
a) Damage to the nation state’s capability to wage war is a political decision. Always.
b) decreased ability to not fight wars in other non-essential places as a result of being ordered to fight the nation’s wars is also not a military decision. It is a political decision but now finds itself at the mercy of the national military strategy. Fight one, hold one was a nice myth that we cherished for 40 years.
c) still. You must be fucking joking about “whether it was really in our interests to be tied down for a people that still have not demonstrated an ability to take care of themselves.” Shit! We are still tied down in both Japan and Germany, not to mention Korea. Where did you ever develop the simple minded idea that America fights and leaves? How long were we in the PI? How long were we in Cuba? You VMI grads are as ignorant of history as Citadel grads are. You should read more history.
3. Keane retires honorably and then subjects his government to his scrutiny and decides that his servants are misbehaving and as a citizen and not as a subject, decides to take some action to amend the behavior of his servants. Why do you see a problem with that?
Keane is the only one that acted out of honor and duty. He didn’t lick up the spittle of those politicians appointed to high office, he did what integrity demanded. You cannot fault him for that because that is his right as a citizen. The fact that you feel that he had no right to act as a citizen is enough to establish you as an ignorant fool. How is his right to act to influence policy abrogated by the fact that he is a retired officer? Dipstick politicians take that right straight over to K street on retirement and nobody questions their integrity…except the ONE.
Do you by any chance who was Army COS? Was it a retired 4 star brought back for a bit more active duty…..
You wonder what the effect will be when Obama elects to bypass the normal rules viz Taiwan and the navy. Consider his behavior bypassing the board of directors at GM and firing Wagoner all by himself.
You wanted a tyrant, you got it.
What you can look forward to with this one is that he will slash military/discretionary funding well into the marrow on the bone and then demand that we intercede in any number of 3rd world pointless struggles on behalf of “progressive” movements. Shit. I won’t be surprised to find orders to a MEB to deploy to Gaza to defend those harmless little Palestinian shits against the Zionist aggression.
Shoomaker was Army COS. If Casey, Pace and the others are to blame than so is he.
I’ll not debate every point one by one-however I will take exception with the Korea and Japanese comparisons and Germany-this is nothing like any of those things. Furthermore, how many commitments can we afford, if we fight and stay there will come a time when we have to choose which baby we can feed.
As for Keane-well the idea that uniformed leadership is somehow to blame for the failure in Iraq early on is to omit the President’s and Rumsfeld’s responsibility for starting the war in the first place and then under resourcing it. Furthermore if Keane acted honorably then so too did the Generals who acted to oppose the war and get Rumsfeld fired. Most folks don’t like that-you can’t have it both ways. If Keane has the right to act as a private citizen working around the chain of command to foster the war-then others have the right to oppose it.
As for GM-well I would point out that many times creditors have been able to affect a change of management. Wagoner did not have to take federal money. He could have stayed and not taken any money…….and still gone bankrupt.
Despite Curtis’ acerbic tone, of course he is right. Japan, Korea and Germany are just like Iraq in the sense that, eventually the conqueror become the “ally” or “partner” Its just that you are blinded by your own prejudices.
In the 1950’s, Korea was as strange and unfathomable to Americans as Iraq and Af-Pak is today. No ONE thought that we would be there over 50 years later.
No doubt seeing the Military that you love being wasted in places like Iraq and Afghanistan has upset you very much. I can understand why. Wrong war, wrong place etc. Hopefully we have learned from our mistakes and maybe the “new” strategy in Af-PAk will work. I doubt it but we shall see.
Thanks for the review. If I can get through the rest of the stack, I hope to read this one this year. I read Fiasco last year (and I read Making the Corps a few years back) because I wanted to see what an outside observer could gather about the war and because I liked Ricks’ style of writing. My biggest complaint from Fiasco was that I don’t think he approached the work from a historian’s point of view, but rather from that of a reporter (which is what he is). I fully realize that we are not yet far enough away to write a definitive history, but I think both of these works will be good resources for a future historian.
Curtis – please don’t confuse Skippy with a VMI grad. Please come over to OP-FOR if you need a VMI view. Skippy more than adequately covers The Citadel view…
I’ve been opposed to the Iraq war since the fall of 2002 when I was involved in coming up with the logistics plans to get and keep five carriers during the war. We correctly saw then-that it would be a logistics train wreck. It was about 6 weeks till the “system” finally responded with enough capacity. The key question that many folks a lot smarter and more senior than me asked at the time was-“why now? Saddam’s not going anywhere.” However at the time, I did not envision that come 6 years later we would still be so hopelessly mired in the country. I don’t think anyone else did either-except for some smart guys like James Webb.
At least in Korea and Japan-when the fighting stopped, it stopped. We were able to get on a with a decent lifestyle and the country advanced. There was also an external threat to Korea and Japan-one that does not exist in Iraq. Iraq’s biggest threat is its own people.
Plus, lets face it, the Koreans and Japanese and even the Germans have a lot more on the ball than Arabs ever will.
Please add to your reading list;
Mullaney’s: “The Unforgiving Minute”
see the review at Military.com or Defense Tech.