The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008

434 Pages·2009·8.85 MB·English

by  Thomas E. Ricks

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Fiasco
T HE G A M B LE
GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS AND THE AMERICAN
MILITARY ADVENTURE IN IRAQ, 2 0 0 6 - 2 0 08
U.S. $27.95
Canada $3 1.00
Based on unprecedented real-time access to the
military's entire chain of command, The Gamble is
the definitive account of the insurgency within the
U.S. military that led to a radical shift in America's
strategy in Iraq—and the bloody implementation of
that strategy on the ground
In The Gamble, Thomas E. Ricks documents the inside
story of the Iraq war since late 2005. Using hundreds of
hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and
extraordinary on-the-ground reportage, Ricks—working
in the tradition of his highly lauded Fiasco—examines
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 on the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated
Palestinian pacifist.
The Gamble offers newsbreaking information,
revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements among
top commanders. Petraeus gave military expert Ricks
extraordinary privileged access to himself and his team
during the past two years, and the result is a chronicle
of astonishing vividness and analytical depth. 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
(continued from front flap)
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. 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 probably have
not yet happened."
Thomas E. Ricks is The Washington Post's senior
Pentagon correspondent, where he has covered the U.S.
military since 2000. Until the end of 1999 he held the
same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a
reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer
Prize-winning teams for national reporting, he has
reported on U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti,
Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey,
Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of Fiasco,
Making the Corps, and A Soldiers Duty.
The A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Penguin 375 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10014
Press www.penguin.com
PRAISE FOR
FIASCO: THE AMERICAN MILITARY ADVENTURE IN IRAQ
"The title of this devastating new book about the American war in Iraq says it all: Fiasco. [Thomas
E. Ricks] serves up his portrait of that war as a misguided exercise in hubris, incompetence and
folly with a wealth of detail and evidence that is both staggeringly vivid and persuasive. . . .
Fiasco is absolutely essential reading. . . . [T]his volume gives the reader a lucid, tough-minded
overview of this tragic enterprise that stands apart from earlier assessments in terms of simple
"Few, if any, journalists know the U.S. military better than Ricks, its organizational strengths,
its flaws, its capacity for battlefield heroism and it's a tendency to do the wrong thing with the
right motive. . . . Fiasco is not a screed but a well-researched, strongly written account of the
miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife."
—LOS ANGELES TIMES
"In his compelling and well-researched book, Thomas E. Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
for The Washington Post, painfully but clearly reveals an important truth about the Iraq debacle:
It has a thousand fathers. As the title implies, Fiasco pulls no punches . . . devastating . . .
damning . . . [Thomas Ricks s] reporting is impressive indeed. News on Iraq usually comes with
blaring headlines, but Ricks's work allows us to fit seemingly disparate events into an overall
pattern. . . . Powerful."
—THE WASHINGTON POST
"Few would disagree with the analysis in Fiasco. Mr. Ricks makes several convincing points
about what underlay the insurgency, notably the supreme importance of the value of respect for
personal dignity in Arab society. . . . Gripping."
ISBN 978-1-59420-197-4
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THE GAMBLE

ALSO BY THOMAS E. RICKS
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure
in Iraq, 2003-2005
Making the Corps
A Soldier's Duty

T HE
G A M B LE
GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS AND THE AMERICAN
MILITARY ADVENTURE IN IRAQ, 2006-2008
THOMAS E. RICKS
THE PENGUIN PRESS
New York
2009
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Thomas E. Ricks, 2009
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Ricks, Thomas E.
The gamble : General David Petraeus and the American military adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 /
Thomas E. Ricks,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59420-197-4
1. Iraq War, 2003- 2. Petraeus, David Howell—Military leadership. 3. Iraq War, 2003—Campaigns.
4. United States—History, Military—21st century. I. Title.
DS79.76.R537 2009
956.7044'340973—dc22
2008044510
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 79 10 8 6 42
DESIGNED BY AMANDA DEWEY
MAPS BY GENE THORP
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Note on the jacket photograph: The jacket depicts combat engineers from the U.S. Army's 2nd Stryker Cavalry
Regiment detonating bombs along a road in Iraq's Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, in August 2008.