Do Surges Work?

The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the State Department or the U.S. government.

From September 2005 to August 2006, I was a U.S. diplomat in a tiny regional office in Basra, the second-largest city in Iraq located in the far south, a stone's throw from Iran. Our office was in a compound known as "The Palace," surrounded by high cement walls topped with barbed wire, under the protection of the British military. My counterparts from the British Foreign Office, located in the same compound, operated according to the belief that the best approach to counter insurgency activity in Iraq was to take a "handsoff" approach and let Iraqis sort themselves out without getting involved in the complex situation. The British perspective, undoubtedly colored by their experience in Northern Ireland, where the presence of soldiers on the streets inflamed the local population, ran counter to the beliefs of the Iraqis I talked to: hundreds of politicians, government workers, academics, humanitarian aid workers, and anyone else brave enough to enter our compound. These Iraqis had suffered immensely under Saddam's regime and were so inured to violence that they were rarely alarmed by gunfire and explosions. Violence, in fact, was frequently seen as the most appropriate response to situations. Families retaliated against each other through vendetta killings. Every televised Iraqi soccer match ended in massive rounds of celebratory gunfire. The Shia population of Basra largely viewed the British as ineffective because of their reluctance to use their military to establish absolute control of the area. Tribal leaders urged us to lobby the U.S. government in Washington to increase our military presence in Iraq and quash criminals and militias with our tanks and troops, precisely the approach the United States took in 2007 when President Bush ordered five additional brigades, about 20,000 extra troops, to Iraq. The "surge" was a last-ditch attempt to halt spiraling sectarian and anti-coalition violence that threatened to lay waste to all of the U.S. efforts to bring peace, stability, and democracy to the country it preemptively invaded in 2003.

From 2005 to 2008, Tom Ricks rode around Iraq in U.S. military vehicles and was privy to discussions between top U.S. military commanders, laying the groundwork for The Gamble. The book, Ricks's second on the Iraq war, picks up where Fiasco, the first book, left off: after the elections of December 2005 but before the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The challenge facing the U.S. military was to eradicate Al Qaeda in Iraq and provide breathing room for the Iraqi government to rule the country without being in a constant state of emergency. From the perspective of the U.S. military, all problems in Iraq were essentially military, stemming from the initial U.S. 2003 invasion, and required a military solution. Because Ricks relies almost exclusively on interviews with U.S. military and State Department officials in Baghdad and Washington, DC, he creates the impression that the U.S. profoundly affected events in Iraq, that the most important players in the field were Generals Petraeus and Odierno, and that the political and economic fabric of Iraq outside of Baghdad was inconsequential.

My time in Iraq suggests otherwise: the sequestering of the U.S. presence behind high walls in Baghdad led to the assumption that the country could be controlled from within the Green Zone. From where I stood outside the Green Zone, it appeared that the Iraqi government and events throughout the country were largely outside of our control, and that we frequently deluded ourselves into attributing positive developments in the country to our own efforts, when instead it was deal-brokering between Iraq's political parties and militias that was largely responsible for everything that was happening outside the walls of the Green Zone, and certainly outside of Baghdad.

Most writers and analysts have realized...