For the British reader interested in military affairs, this book is no pleasure. Just as Petraeus and Odierno were adopting ‘British’ counterinsurgency doctrine, the British abandoned it, withdrawing from Basra City and taking no effective part in the chaotic but succesful Iraqi campaigns last year to retake Basra and Amara. If the surviving purpose of our engagement in Iraq was the good opinion of Americans, on the evidence of this book, boy, is that good opinion gone.

Did Petraeus and Odierno succeed? Well, American military deaths in action fell from 126 at the height of the surge in May 2007, to 12 last month, but two suicide bombings in early March inspire no confidence. A brilliant tactical success, the surge may well have been a strategic failure.

As Emma Sky, an Englishwoman on Odierno’s staff and the Gertie Bell of this story, explained to Ricks: ‘You could buy time and space for the government of Iraq, and it wouldn’t reach accommodation because the system isn’t capable of it.’ (Sky’s account of the surge is in the Royal United Services Institute Journal of last April, Vol 153, No. 2, and costs £4.) Ricks ends with the ominous sentence: ‘The events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.’

Meanwhile, Petraeus has moved to Central Command in Tampa, Florida, overseeing the military not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where a Pushtun insurgency is gaining Iraqi scale.

James Buchan’s latest novel, The Gate of Air, is published by the MacLehose Press.

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