The man for the hour

At the turn of 2007, the United States was facing defeat in Baghdad. Shia and Sunni were on killing sprees, the supply line from Kuwait was under constant attack, and F-16s were in action on Haifa Street, less than a mile from the fortified US embassy.

Yet commanders in Iraq, and civilians from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld downwards, clung to a bankrupt strategy: withdraw US forces to colossal operating bases outside town — Camp Victory, Camp Liberty — and leave the streets to an untrained Iraqi army, the sectarian national police and to the thieves and murderers. Meanwhile, success was measured in body count whatever the cost to the population, summed up by Col. Michael Steele of the 101st Airborne, ‘Anytime you fight, you always kill the other sonofabitch’, and by the military scandals of Haditha and Abu Ghraib prison.

In this fine book, Thomas E. Ricks, an experienced military correspondent for the Washington Post, tells how two professional soldiers, Gen. David H. Petraeus and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, changed the course of the war. The one a lean military philosopher, the other a bullet-headed fighting general, they by-passed the chain of command, going behind Rumsfeld and the joint chiefs of staff, direct to the President and Vice-President. By the way, George W. Bush is presented by Ricks as a far more capable commander-in-chief than anybody in this country had imagined.

The new strategy, known as the surge, consisted not so much of the five extra fighting brigades that started arriving in February 2007 but of a recognition that Iraq was in the throes of civil war and that the key to success was to protect the Iraqi population. That meant not to move out of but into the city and ‘stop commuting to war’ in heavily armoured vehicles.