The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008
Thomas E. Ricks. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2009. Illus. 394 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by John R. Ballard
Those who have read Tom Ricks' earlier book on the Iraq War, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, will find this one very different. The Gamble is much more tightly focused, dealing principally with a two-year time-span, and its judgments are better informed by interviews with people who understood the ground truth in Iraq. And, happily, this book has no axe to grind, but instead tells the very valuable story of the crucial turning point in the war and the professionalism of Americans and Iraqis who persevered long enough to bring it about.
The Gamble begins with one of the signal errors of the war: the incident when several Iraqi families were killed by Marines in the small town of Haditha in the northern part of al Anbar province. Ricks uses that incident of November 2005 to show how far American tactics had gone off target just two-and-one-half years into the fight. The remainder of the book tells how American forces reoriented their tactics to operate in small outposts among the Iraqis, focusing on the correct objective: protecting the population.
In 2006 hopeful expectations were restored, but that optimism was dashed by the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which ignited tensions and drove the Sunni minority into al Qaeda-inspired sectarian war with their neighbors. That insurgent strategy fundamentally disabled General George W. Casey's security force build-up and severely dimmed prospects of victory in Iraq. But in the same year, leaders at all levels took the initiative, changed minds in Washington D.C., and accepted greater risk and more casualties to stave off defeat and remake the war effort in 2007.
That correction was inspired and guided by a complex system of people and events, all of which make this book both interesting to general readers and useful for policy makers. Generals David Petraeus, Casey, John (Jack) Keane, and Raymond Odierno, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker are central players in Ricks' story. But the book also acknowledges the essential tactical roles played by Colonel H. R. McMaster and Colonel Sean MacFarland, as well as strategic decisions made by President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The important contributions of civilians outside government also are given appropriate weight. Among those he credits are Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute; David Kilcullen, who served as Petraeus' senior counterinsurgency adviser during the 2007 surge; and Emma Sky, the formerly anti-war Briton who became one of Odierno's trusted advisers in understanding Iraq's civilian population, earning her the nickname, "Iraq's Gertrude Bell." Ricks makes the enormity of changing strategy during combat operations very clear.
The debate still rages over the role of the Iraqi government and the impact of the Sons of Iraq in the turnaround toward victory there. Even if that debate remains unresolved, there can be no doubt that individual commanders did initiate better approaches in Tal Afar, Fallujah, Ramadi, and even parts of Baghdad, well before President Bush's decision to execute the surge in January 2007. But the central issue of Ricks' book is not specifically about the who but how the American military was able to learn and adapt, to understand its mistakes, and take corrective action to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, even while fighting all-out in a complex environment. That story will be fundamental to future histories of the Iraq War.
Ricks' book reads easily and keeps the reader's attention through the maze of key decisions taken inside and outside Iraq. His prognosis of a long, troubled future for Iraq at the end of the book seems the only weakness in an otherwise accurate and insightful analysis of the dominant turn of the war.
Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East
Rashid Khalidi. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009. Intro. Notes. Index. 308 pp. $25.95.
Reviewed by Dan Moran
Rashid Khalidi's Sowing Crisis is a contribution to the already enormous academic and polemical literature, which holds that most of the problems in the Middle East are the fault of Jews and Americans, and before that Jews and Englishmen. This is by no means an indefensible perspective, though it does require a defense, rather than being granted prima facie plausibility, as it is here. Khalidi's ideological commitment to Arab victimization deprives most of the inhabitants of the Middle East of any effective role in determining their own history. At the same time, his manifest lack of sympathy for, or insight into, the mental and moral universe of those making the real decisions in Washington and Moscow give the whole book an odd, flat, and tendentious tone. The history of the Middle East in the Cold War (and since), as told here, is basically one episode of feckless manipulation after another, in which center stage is always held by ignorant outsiders who never manage to accomplish whatever it is they have set out to do and just end up making a mess in the process.
Part of Khalidi's purpose, as he says, is "to stress the largely unacknowledged importance of the Middle East in the strategic calculations of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War." Yet the author has a hard time taking the Cold War seriously. It too is mostly about ignorance and manipulation and arose in the first place mainly from the failure of the United States to recognize the basically defensive posture of the Soviet Union in world affairs. This mistake set in motion a tit-for-tat rivalry that spread around the world because nobody else had the wherewithal to push back against the coercion and blandishments of the superpowers.
Khalidi's general argument is that laying Cold War rivalries on top of the Middle East's home-grown conflicts generally made them worse, by affording the local protagonists more lethal means to get at each other and by discouraging impulses toward compromise and conciliation that, had they been allowed to flourish, might have created conditions that cut against the fault lines created by Great-Power interests. Whether this alternative history would have been an improvement is hard to say, however; history, fortunately, is not an experimental discipline, and Khalidi admits that the result might have been more violence rather than less. The commonplace notion that war in the Middle East is the result of "ancient" animosities is mostly nonsense, as Khalidi says; but not always. The worst of the region's modern wars was fought between Iran and Iraq, across an international frontier that is centuries old, over issues that had little or nothing to do with Soviet-American rivalry.
This is worth recalling as a reminder that, at the root of what used to be called the "Eastern question," there has always lain a nagging sense that the Middle East is not a place where the rest of the world can afford to let the chips fall where they may. Whatever self-serving attitudes and misbegotten policies may have accumulated around this outlook, nothing that has happened in the region in the last century suggests that such anxiety has been misplaced. It may be true that every place has a right to its own War of the Roses. But it is asking a great deal of human nature to argue on the one hand that the Middle East is inherently a region of global strategic significance, and on the other that everybody should stand back and let those who live there work out their differences as they see fit. This may be good advice, but it is easy to see why it has proven so hard to take.
The Deep: Voyages to Titanic and Beyond
Anatoly M. Sagalevich with Paul T. Isley III. Foreword by James Cameron. Redondo Beach, California: Botanical Press, 2009. Illus. Maps. Index. 295 pp. $65.
Reviewed by Don Walsh
Dr. Anatoly Sagalevich is arguably one of the world's most experienced manned-submersible pilots. As head of the Laboratory for Manned Submersibles at the P. P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he has pioneered Soviet/Russian deep-ocean operations for nearly four decades, designing, testing, and managing several deep-ocean submersibles.
The Deep: Voyages to Titanic and Beyond is a fascinating personal account of the little-known operations of Russia's two Finnish-built Mir manned submersibles. With more than 1,000 dives to his credit, this is a story that only "Tolya" Sagalevich could tell.
During the Cold War, most U.S. manned-submersible operations were in support of U.S. Navy requirements. The same was true in the Soviet Union; while they had developed other submersibles, those operated by the Shirshov were the most productive.
Sagalevich does not discuss much of his Soviet-military-directed work, but he does give an intimate view of the evolution of manned-submersible development in the Soviet Union. This includes an excellent description of how the Mirs were designed, built, and tested in 1987.
There has been virtually no open literature in the West on this important undersea history. There have been a few hundred scientific reports from these operations, and nearly all were in Russian. However, during the past two decades the Mirs have been increasingly featured in Western publications. However, their greatest exposure to the public has been through movie and television productions such as James Cameron's programs on RMS Titanic and Bismarck as well as in IMAX movies.
The reason for the "showbiz" use of the Mirs was quite simple. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was no money to continue these scientific missions. At Shirshov there were threats to decommission the subs and the dedicated mother ship, Akademik Keldysh, to conserve funding for less costly oceanographic programs. The end of the submersible program was a real possibility.
Sagalevich realized that he had to look beyond Russia for support. He became a successful entrepreneur, and soon the Mir submersibles were taking paying passengers to see the wrecks of RMS Titanic (at a depth of 12,500 feet) and the German World War II battleship Bismarck (at 15,300 feet) as well as black smokers (hydrothermal vents at 9,000 feet) in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Today Russian oceanographic science is gradually receiving more government funding. The Mirs are returning to their original mission, support of marine science.
This book was first published in Russia in 2002. In the English-language edition, with the important assistance of Paul Isley III, considerable new subject material, images, and maps were added. The result is an attractive coffee-table book that contains stories of diving projects from general oceanographic explorations and their related discoveries to the intricate operations at the wreck site of the lost nuclear-powered submarine Kosomolets. Between these two polar points are interesting stories of making movies, from the successful Hollywood movie "Titanic" to the complex and difficult filming of the large-format IMAX productions. The Deep is full of official and personal photographs in what amounts to a scrapbook of one man's odyssey through the oceans' depths. Artwork and maps of more than 140 Mir/Keldysh expeditions since the subs became operational in 1989 add to its interest. The Deep is a great sea story told by a man who was a witness to-and who is still making-oceanographic history.
Weyers Flotten Taschenbuch 2008/2010
Werner Globke, editor. Bonn, Germany: Bernard & Graefe, 2008. 941 pp. Photos. Illus. $89.
Reviewed by Norman Friedman
Weyers differs from, and complements, the massive fleet reference guides such as Jane's Fighting Ships (Jane's Information Group), Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World (Naval Institute Press), and Les Flottes de Combat (Editions Maritimes et D'Outres-Mer). It is designed specifically for use on a bridge or at a naval review, conceived as a classic ship-recognition manual, its drawings assembled fleet-by-fleet for easy reference. Data are separated from the drawings and photographs so that the user can quickly flip through the ships. The other books, by contrast, are guides to fleets, class by class; a reader cannot possibly browse through them to see at a glance that the ship visible to him is, say, a frigate of a particular type. To some extent publishers recognize the problem by offering electronic versions of the massive handbooks, but even then the equivalent to flipping through the book to find the right ship or class may be inconvenient.
The visual element of the book is emphasized by the lists of ship pennant numbers in the illustrative sections for major navies. If you are in the South China Sea, it really matters what the number on the side of the Chinese destroyer looming out of the mist means. Weyers tells you in exactly the place you need the information, not in the list of the ships of one class or another, but in a list of all Chinese destroyers near the beginning of the Chinese visual section.
Despite its compact size, Weyers' drawings are both excellent and large enough to use. They are so good that I wish they were available in a much larger format-you cannot find anything comparable elsewhere for many classes-then again, this would defeat the book's purpose.
Keeping Weyers pocket-sized must be a considerable exercise in self-discipline. Its editor, Werner Globke, has no opportunity to discuss each class and its relationship to other types, or its combat systems (other than giving tabular data). He does provide a detailed summary of fleet developments, which in this edition is translated for the first time into English. He also includes numerous tables of key data: aircraft operated by the various navies; missiles, guns, torpedoes, radars, sonars, and a summary of amphibious forces. Data tables are compressed using numerous ingenious symbols with which past users of Weyers are familiar.
Globke has done a remarkably complete job. Analysts of the Chinese and Russian navies, for example, will find it particularly helpful to have their current and recent building records at a glance. The Chinese entry includes both the incomplete ex-Varyag and the widely-discussed future aircraft carrier programs. The Indian section includes considerable detail of the new Indian-built carrier now under construction, as well as of the ex-Gorshkov, now in its final stages of modernization.
The only glaring drawback is that there is essentially no treatment of combat direction or combat data systems, which increasingly determine the capabilities of a fleet-and which unfortunately receive little attention in other naval reference books. Similarly, Weyers does not tabulate electronic warfare systems. Again, they are listed by its much more massive rivals, but none of those books gives the reader an idea of what works and what does not, or how, or why. The absence of even an approach to this subject is a major problem in the naval reference world as a whole.