Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq
Linda Robinson. New York: Public Affairs, 2008. 391 pp. Map. $27.95
Reviewed by David Wood
"Pull over! Pull Over!" Careening down a Los Angeles freeway in a rented Chevy Suburban with his wife Holly at the wheel, General David Petraeus gestured wildly, a cell phone at his ear.
Holly took the next exit and drove into a convenience store parking lot in a bad part of town. It was 4 January 2007, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was offering Petraeus the assignment of saving Iraq. Now it would be Petraeus' responsibility to answer the anxious plea that he himself, commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, had posed to journalist Rick Atkinson in 2003: Tell me how this ends.
Twenty months after he accepted that daunting job, as the U.S. enterprise in Iraq seemed to dangle on the edge of strategic if not tactical failure, and with domestic politics reaching a screaming crescendo, Iraq has staggered into a period of calm. Sorting out what factors and stratagems were most responsible will be the work of generations. Meantime, Linda Robinson's lively narrative in Tell Me How This Ends gives us the Petraeus reign in Baghdad and provides a solid and informed account of what's happened since he took the helm, with fascinating insights into the backroom political intrigue and powerful street-level reporting on the Soldiers who, in the end, made the difference.
Robinson lines up the villains of the war and dispatches them briskly. In his biweekly teleconferences with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki President Bush breezily undermined the careful political machinations of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Admiral William J. "Fox" Fallon, whom Bush chose in January 2007 to lead Central Command, foisted his analysis of Iraq's problems on the President without ever having set foot in Iraq. General George W. Casey, Iraq's commander for 31 months, "led the war but he did not win it," Robinson writes. "He was unwilling to admit that Iraq had outfoxed him" and tried to fight the war "with too few troops, accepting the constraints (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld placed on him.'' General Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman from 2005 to 2007, misread the nature of counterinsurgency, deeming the political aspects "outside his lane."
If all these failed, who and what did achieve some success in Iraq? In Robinson's view, it was the synergy created by the "surge" of 21,500 combat troops that began as Petraeus arrived in Baghdad; better intelligence; the U.S. command's outreach to "reconcilable" insurgents and sectarian politicians; and the dispersion of the surge troops into 68 outposts, where they conducted joint operations with a growing Iraqi army and police force. Above all, Robinson believes, was Petraeus's willingness to engage in Iraqi politics "as no general before him had done." Hourly, Petraeus and Crocker struggled to identify and pry apart the strands of Sunni and Shia politics to lure and co-opt some pretty hardened characters into grudging cooperation. Their success can be seen today in Iraq's fitful but functioning government and in the tens of thousands of former insurgents now receiving U.S. pay as civilian "Sons of Iraq" security forces—a temporary expedient that bears scrutiny.
But don't look for the magic bullet in Robinson's book. "Petraeus may not have brought the Iraq war to its conclusion," writes this veteran correspondent in her carefully crafted summation:
"But what he did accomplish will surely be enshrined in the annals of U.S. military history and counterinsurgency warfare. . . when historians look for parallels to Petraeus' tour in Iraq, they will most likely compare it to Ridgway's in Korea, where he managed to push back the Chinese and stabilize the Korean peninsula. The Korean War did not end on his watch and it did not end in victory.''
And so with David Petraeus, she writes, who "gave Iraq a chance to climb out of its civil war and America a chance to redeem itself for the errors it made there.'' The next president, she advises, must not squander that opportunity.
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan
Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi, Eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 430 pp. Notes. $27.95.
Reviewed by Colonel Michael Paulovich, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
The Taliban made a quick and violent entrance onto the global political stage, was attacked and declared defeated in 2002, and now has reorganized and reappeared. Is the Taliban that has emerged in recent months the same group that came to power in 1994, and how do we situate this group in relation to Afghan culture and history? These are important questions for policy makers, academics, and personnel working in-country, as they search for security solutions.
The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, edited by Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi, contains a series of eight thought-provoking essays investigating how the Taliban came to power, ruled, and was toppled in 2002. Each essay documents a particular, fully developed aspect of the Taliban, the roots of its movement, its Pashtun character, linkages to Pakistan and Iran, its repressive gender politics, and the current Taliban movement.
The essays, written by a broad range of scholars, are preceded by a thoughtful introduction and provide a multidisciplinary study of the movement. The contributors are distinguished historians and anthropologists. Editor Robert Crews teaches history at Stanford University and his co-editor, Amin Tarzi, is the Director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University.
At the outset, Crews and Tarzi express their intent to depart from previous studies of the Taliban. They argue that the earlier work of journalists and scholars has focused on the group's more obvious characteristics, highlighting connections to "Pakistani Security Services, mafia elites, energy companies, Islamic radicals, and al Qaeda." The focus on the origins of the Taliban movement, with an emphasis on external elements, only partly explains its rapid accession and sudden collapse. Instead, the essays' authors present broader, more integrated studies of the Taliban's character and evolution. This approach, they believe, better explains how the group known as the "Neo-Taliban" has reconstructed the shattered pieces of the movement to become a more significant player in Afghan politics.
Collections of essays often fail to achieve focus. Here the essays do manage to provide the reader with a solid understanding of internal Afghan politics and begin to explain how these actors engaged the external community.
The book is a good resource for military students, since it outlines the issues yet does not offer all the answers. Although written by scholars, the book merits a wider audience. Anyone who served in Afghanistan or followed events through the media will find the essays insightful. While this is not a primer on Afghan politics and history, the introduction does an exceptional job in outlining the human and physical geography of the region and its ethnic complexities.
It's refreshing to read a work of contemporary history that is not based solely on media accounts and current political issues. Although this book does not provide any explicit policy recommendations, it gives the reader the tools to make independent decisions.
Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy
Robert J. Schneller Jr. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. 437 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $45.
Reviewed by Paul Stillwell
The integration of the U.S. Naval Academy was a long, slow, painful process—just how long, slow, and painful is made clear in Dr. Schneller's new work. Blue & Gold and Black is a sequel to his excellent Breaking the Color Barrier (New York University Press, 2005). Originally the two parts formed one comprehensive manuscript on the topic. They were broken into separate volumes for the sake of publishing realities, and they complement each other well.
Schneller's first book traced the unsuccessful efforts of black midshipmen to survive at Annapolis. In the decades prior to World War II, five men were appointed, and all were driven out by unwelcome attitudes on the part of both fellow midshipmen and the Naval Academy command structure. In 1949, Wesley A. Brown became the first African American to graduate; his counterpart at West Point had done so 72 years earlier.
This new book takes up the story of the integration of the Academy at the moment of Brown's success and carries it forward through the end of the 20th century. In so doing, Schneller has managed a Herculean amount of research. As he explains in his preface, he has told the story using a two-pronged approach—top down and bottom up. He examines the cultural shift in the context of the changing times within the country and its armed forces and also by sewing together a kind of quilt of the experiences of dozens of black midshipmen.
In the 20 years spanning the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, the Academy's official attitude toward black midshipman could best be described as one of gradual, if reluctant, acceptance. Even within that framework, many white midshipmen still made life difficult for blacks—to the point of driving out a number of them. For instance, the school's football coaches recruited James Frezzell, who entered the Academy in 1964. The coaches counseled him to downplay any talk of civil rights; just concentrate on football, they told him. Meanwhile his fellow midshipmen subjected him to so much physical exercise that he lost 25 pounds in two months. The harassment then and in ensuing months hampered his ability to concentrate on his studies, and he was eventually asked to leave school for academic reasons.
The Academy's passive approach was forced to adjust in 1965 through the intervention of President Lyndon Johnson. The Southerner who had pushed for the passage of dramatic civil rights legislation directed the Secretary of the Navy to double the percentage of black midshipmen, which was then an abysmally low—nine men out of 4,100—0.2 percent.
The officer on whom implementation of this policy fell was the Academy's superintendent, Rear Admiral Draper Kauffman. He was a member of a longtime Navy family, and he acknowledged that he was more attuned to civil rights in theory than in practice. All of a sudden, the acceptance of a few black mids had been turned into a requirement to recruit many more. Kauffman soon discovered that this requirement was easier to fulfill in theory than in practice.
Because the Academy's culture had long been unreceptive to change, and with the Academy lying outside the awareness of many black citizens, it wasn't possible to turn on the recruiting spigot quickly and effectively. But, according to Schneller, Kauffman made a good-faith effort, which gained momentum in the early 1970s when Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt Jr. insisted on increasing opportunities for African Americans in the service. That shift in climate dramatically increased the minority enrollment at the Academy, to the point that black midshipmen became an integral part of the brigade.
That's the top-down part of the story, which Schneller demonstrates with manifold statistics. The bottom-up narrative, which tells of the lives of individual midshipmen, is even more compelling because it reveals more vividly the cultural shifts. Here we learn about the non-institutional support systems, such as black Annapolis residents Lillie Mae Chase and Margaret Kimbo, who provided places to relax when the mids were able to get away from Bancroft Hall. We read of the successful careers of many of the black graduates. And the book traces a minority within a minority, that of black female midshipmen, who faced double pressures in terms of prejudice and discrimination. To read of some of the things they had to endure makes one cringe.
Thanks to his remarkably thorough research and his cast of mind, Schneller has produced what is likely to remain the definitive work on a process that took far too long to accomplish.
In a Time of War: The Proud and Perilous Journey of West Point's Class of 2002
Bill Murphy Jr. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008. 384 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. $27.50
Reviewed by Louis A. DiMarco
Inspired by Rick Atkinson's The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966, Bill Murphy's In a Time of War attempts a similar analysis of the first West Point class to graduate during wartime in more than 30 years. Murphy's story of the Class of 2002 in Iraq and Afghanistan is well-written, interesting, and often moving. However, given that it was written nearly simultaneously with the events it describes, it lacks necessary perspective and therefore cannot convey the sense of unity of Atkinson's classic work.
Murphy examines the experiences, challenges, and sacrifices of the Class of '02, members of generation "Y," as they graduate from the Academy and go on to their five-year service obligation to the Army. The narrative gives highlights of the class's four years at West Point and ends as the classmates complete their service obligations and must choose whether to remain in the Army or resign their commissions.
In particular, Murphy concentrates on a small group of classmates, members of West Point Company D-1, examining the stories of several graduates in detail. He follows them through officer training and their first assignments and writes of their personal relationships. He focuses specifically on the experiences of the officers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan and how those conflicts affect their lives and the lives of the people close to them.
Bill Murphy, a reserve Army officer, reported from Iraq for the Washington Post in 2007 and cut his teeth as a journalist while working as research assistant to Bob Woodward on the latter's best-selling book on the Bush Administration, State of Denial. He interviewed nearly 200 members of the class and their friends, colleagues, and families.
Despite its thorough reporting, however, In a Time of War can't compensate for its absence of perspective. Much of this is beyond Murphy's control. The present, indeterminate nature of the conflict limits judgment regarding the war and its lasting impact. A true understanding of these Soldiers' experiences will come only with time.
Murphy is at his best when he concentrates on the details, particularly when he examines the stresses Soldiers face due to multiple and extended deployments, injuries, their difficulties in establishing and sustaining relationships, and the devastation to the families and comrades of Soldiers who die in combat.
In a Time of War is an often poignant portrayal of the Army at war. While it omits nuances of West Point's officer training and the conduct of tactical operations and larger, strategic policies, it manages to remind readers—including, one hopes, mid-level and senior military leaders—of the intense stresses faced by a generation of young leaders on whom the greater burden of current operations fall. For this reason it's a worthy read.