What a day. Woke up hungover in a Parsippany, NJ Holiday Inn; stumbled through a too-short goodbye to newlyweds Liz and Tim; drove back to D.C. — actually, rode back to D.C., since Attackerlady drove, owing to some lingering complications with my license; wrote a 2000-word reported piece about the public-diplomacy apparatus at the State Dept. that Obama and Clinton have inherited, slated for 8 a.m. publication; and, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, saw that Laura Rozen got at a lot of that piece in her evening post. Oh, and I plowed through my remaining 100 pages of The Gamble, the second volume in Tom Ricks’ journalistic history of the Iraq war.

I’m reviewing the book for The National, a really excellent English-language newspaper in the Arab world that’s proving to be a crucial paycheck for many journalists during these dark times, but I’ll use this blog to work out some iterations of the review and sharpen my perceptions. Basically, it’s excellent, with a wealth of detail and an even greater wealth of insight. I’ve been noticing people think Ricks is a cheerleader for Odierno, Petraeus and Jack Keane. That assessment doesn’t survive contact with the narrative presented, which is layered, subtle and critical, more positive than antiwar progressives like myself would probably write but nowhere near hagiographic. Some of the meanest gossipy stuff said about either Petraeus or Odierno is found in the book: Petraeus has "a narcissistic, exploitative way of dealing with people," one anonymous officer tells Ricks, for instance; Ricks twice provocatively draws parallels between Odierno and Saddam Hussein. More fundamentally, The Gamble challenges what you think you know about Iraq, the surge, and the broader war. It most certainly challenged what I thought I knew. Any journalist who reads this book has to applaud the sheer amount of work Ricks puts in, from the endless on-the-ground insights from soldiers, marines and sailors throughout the chain of command to the constant pulsing of his own evidence for deeper meaning. It’s as intellectually honest, thorough and rigorous a book of journalism as is possible to write.

I’ll say more on The Gamble in susbsequent posts, as my mind is racing after having finished it and I now need to figure out how to get money to go back to Iraq this year. (I’m toying with an Allbritton-esque fundraiser; if shit is really safer over there, then I need to do an unembedded stint for a prolonged period of time.) But one more thing. My biggest disappointment with The Gamble is that it doesn’t explain how Ray Odierno went from the brutish general commanding the 4th Infantry Division in 2003-4 detailed in Ricks’ previous volume, Fiasco, to the counterinsurgent hero of the surge as corps commander in 2006-8. To a great degree, that failure appears unavoidable, as Odierno apparently wouldn’t reflect on changes in his thinking with Ricks. I will confess that I have long doubted that Odierno had in fact changed, and that view is untenable after The Gamble, although how much he’s changed remains an open question. But the question of why Odierno embraced counterinsurgency is a bigger mystery: after all, there’s nothing about failure in Iraq from 2003-6 that forces an officer in that direction. Odierno could alternatively have gone the route of one of his 4ID battalion commanders, Nate Sassaman, and argued that America should embrace brutality in Iraq before cutting and running. Still, if you’ve got a reticent or uncompliant interview subject, it’s hard to know how else you can get inside the man’s head, and Ricks is clearly frustrated by his inability to provide an answer.

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