Has Tom Ricks Sold Out?

This Slate article is a teaser for a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. Here's a link to that story, which was written by Tara McKelvey.

I read Tom Ricks's book Fiasco. I read it in the summer of 2007, while traveling to the Pacific Northwest. It was very critical of the way the Bush administration and the military had handled Iraq to that point. I have also read his more recent book, Gamble. The focus of that book is very different, and it takes a much more favorable view of the U.S. military. In particular, Gamble is very high on General David Petraeus, and it gives much of the credit for the "surge" to General Ray Odierno. In this, it is somewhat at odds with The War Within by Bob Woodward, which attributes much of the impetus for the surge to Stephen Hadley, Mr. Bush's second National Security Advisor.

The perception that Ricks has turned into an admirer of the military, somehow reversing his positions along the way, is, I think, as mistaken as the perception that Woodward turned on the White House and changed from an admirer to a critic of Mr. Bush. To some degree, both men may have been victims of the thinking that recent trends will continue. When Woodward wrote Bush at War, the war in Afghanistan was looking like a success, and Iraq had not yet been invaded. When he wrote Plan of Attack, the situation in Iraq was looking very dicey. When Ricks wrote Fiasco, about the same time that Martha Raddatz published The Long Road Home, and Rajiv Chandrasekaran published Imperial Life in the Emerald City, nobody thought that the war in Iraq was going well. There were differences among observers about why it was going so badly, but it was hard to find an admirer of the Bush strategy in Iraq back in 2006-2007.

The surge actually did turn things around, although it did so in ways that may not be sustainable. For one thing, it appears that the Iraqi government doesn't like the concrete barriers Petraeus ordered erected all over Baghdad, and there have been several recent bombing as a result.

In any event, I would urge you to read Ms. McKelvey's article, and read Gamble, and make up your own mind.

Gauging Success of Failure in Iraq

To decide whether something was successful or not, one needs to understand the objectives it was supposed to accomplish. A continuing problem in historical analysis is that objectives are often multiple, vague, or equivocal, while apologists sometimes seek to modify the objectives after the fact. For example, the United States lost the War of 1812, and lost it decisively, in terms of the original objectives of the War Hawks, such as Henry Clay, who wanted to annex Canada. One of the results of the Treaty of Ghent was the end of impressment of sailors from American ships. So, after the war, publicists spread the notion that our objective had been to end impressment, and we had. Ipso facto, we won the war! In fact, the British had agreed to terminate the Orders in Council authorizing impressment before they received word of the American declaration of war.

That sort of equivocation has consequences. Because American history texts tended to go along with the notion that we had won the War of 1812, the Richard Nixon’s assertion that he refused to be the first U.S. President to lose a war had some credibility. In fact, Jemmie Madison was the first U.S. President to lose a war (and, one might argue, Jefferson Davis was the second), so Mr. Nixon’s point wasn’t as valid as he liked to think. Valid or not, it did help to prolong the Vietnam war. In one of the great cases of such equivocation, assertions by right-wing German politicians that the German army had won World War I, and that victory had been given away by left-wing (Jewish) politicians, led to the rise of Hitler.

In the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, Steve Simon’s article “The Price of the Surge: How U.S. Strategy Is Hastening Iraq’s Demise,” is ostensibly a straightforward critique of the infusion of additional U.S. soldiers into Iraq in 2007-2008. In reality, Mr. Simon is establishing a basis for blaming the “loss” of the war in Iraq on the surge. Because of the way the surge has developed, Simon asserts, its successes are largely due to the “bottom-up” developments of better relations between Sunni tribes and the U.S. forces, the withdrawal of Shiite militias from active combat, and the reduction of friction between groups through “ethnic cleansing.” All of these are, according to Simon, threats to the development of a strong, unitary Iraqi state. As he says, “A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq’s cohesion over the long run.”

Simon assumes throughout that weakening the central Iraqi state is bad, and that the model that should be followed is that of subordinating the tribe and sects to the state. He asserts, and I’m sure he is correct, that there will be some negative effects of encouraging these centrifugal forces. On the other hand, Simon at no point adduces any evidence that a strong, centralized Iraq is, in fact, the goal of U.S. policymakers or military commanders. It may be true, for example, that strengthening the tribes against the state will weaken the center. But lessening the burden of the center on the tribes may make life tolerable for those tribes, so that they will remain in a (weakly) united Iraq. They might not so readily submit to a strong center dominated by Shiites. Similarly, restoring strong central authority over the three Kurdish provinces is likely to exacerbate, rather than relieve, stresses between the ethnic groups. In brief, a weakly centralized Iraq may be more stable in the long run than an attempt to impose a strong central government on a disunited populace.

The surge appears to have succeeded, not only in “reduc[ing] casualties in the short term,” but in demonstrating that a decentralized approach to Iraqi governance is more workable than attempting to clothe an emperor in Baghdad. I could point to parallels with the American experience before the Civil War, when the slave states were willing, if not content, to remain in a weak Union, but felt themselves force to secede at the prospect of a stronger central government. Moreover, whenever I hear someone lament that Iraq will be weak and disunited, I think to myself that the last time we had a strong central government in Baghdad, it attacked its neighbors in Iran and Kuwait. Would a failure to achieve a powerful Iraqi government really be a sign that we had lost the war?

Knight's Reading List VIII: August 2007

I finished reading eight books during August 2007. Three were works of fiction, and five were non-fiction. Of the latter, one was about the origins of the Islamic religion, while another was about the origins of some of America’s constitutional protections. One was occasioned by my trip that summer to the Pacific Northwest, another by my interest in investment strategies, and the last by seeing that one of my favorite journalists had written a book on a particular battle in the war in Iraq.

Non-Fiction:

3 August: Tor Andrae. Mohammed: The Man and His Faith. Translated by Theophil Menzel. 1955. 194 pages, including Index. I began reading this one on July 22, 2007. This is an old book, translated into English in 1955, years after it was first published. (Mohammed, Sein Leben und Sein Glaube, Goettingen, 1932. It is still an interesting introduction to the founder of Islam, and to the way in which information about Mohammed has come down to us. The discussions of Islamic doctrine are spare – I might say mere outlines - but very clear.

7 August: Leonard W. Levy. Origins of the Bill of Rights. 1999. xii + 306 pages, including Appendix, Bibliography, and Index. I read this one between July 21 and August 7, 2007. Since I read this book, I ran across a reference to Levy at the end of Gore Vidal’s novel Burr (1973). Levy has written many books, and many of those are on aspects of constitutional law. This is a very different book to Akhil Reed Amar’s The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, (1998), which I read some years ago, and, to be frank, I found some of Levy’s accounts hard to accept. But he covers the ground, and tries to provide an understanding of how these critical amendments came about, and why they were felt to be necessary.

9 August: David D. Alt and Donald W. Hyndman. Roadside Geology of Washington. 1994. xii + 288 pages, including Glossary, Suggested Reading, and Index. I started this book on 29 July 2007. I love the Roadside Geology books. In some cases, including this one, a new edition is badly needed. Still, the ability to look at the surrounding scenery from a roadside viewpoint, and find an explanation of how it came to look as it does, is priceless. I found one fact of some personal interest: The part of Washington State in which I grew up, the extreme northeast corner, contains the only remaining accessible rocks from the original North American continent. Anything else left of that ancient continent is buried under thousands of feet of volcanic rock, and all the rest of the state has been formed by subcontinents being pulled by subsidence trenches into the embrace of the land.

20 August: James J. Cramer. Jim Cramer’s Real Money. 2005. ix + 300 pages, including Index. I read this book between 11 and 20 August, 2007. I’ve been seeing Jim Cramer on television a lot, lately. Real Money might help more in these difficult times through the influence of its attitude, than by any specific piece of advice. At least it might give you the illusion of understanding what’s happening.

29 August: Martha, Raddatz. The Long Road Home. 2007. 310 pages. I read this book between August 21 and August 29, 2007. I reviewed this book at length last year, and I’ll let that description stand. Martha Raddatz is often seen on Washington Week in Review, and she has made a dozen or more trips to Iraq since 2003.

Fiction:

16 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. 1997. 312 pages. I began reading on 13 August 2007.

21 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. 1999. vi + 342 pages. I started this book on August 18, 2007.

24 August: J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. 1999. 435 pages. I began reading on 21 August, as soon as I finished the previous book.

I like the Harry Potter series. When the last of the books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, came out in the summer of 2007, I bought a copy for my wife. It was the first of the books I had bought in hardcover; we had the first six volumes in paperback. So, while I was waiting for her to finish Deathly Hallows, I re-read all six of the earlier stories. It is interesting to watch Rowling bring her characters along to increasing maturity, as well as increasing knowledge, and how some of the elements in the earlier books are brought back in the later ones. Events or actions that had a certain significance to the young characters in one of the first books are appreciated differently by the more mature characters later in the series.

Knight's Reading List VII: July 2007

Knight’s Reading List VII: July 2007

Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.

In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.

1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.

4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.

7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.

13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.

15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.

19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.

24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.