Today’s suicide-bombing of an Iraq peace conference and the American commander’s warning that we are “not winning” in Afghanistan are sobering reminders that the Obama troop withdrawal plan did not close the file on US misadventures in the Middle East.
They underscore the final assessment of Thomas Ricks’ new book, “The Gamble”: “The quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq until at least 2015–which would put us not at about the midpoint in the conflict…In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”
Ricks, whose new book along with “The Fiasco” constitute the definitive reporting on Iraq, concludes, “The surge was the right step to take, or more precisely, the least wrong move in a misconceived war…The surge campaign was effective in many ways, but the best grade it can be given is a solid incomplete. It succeeded tactically but fell short strategically.”
His indictment of the military commanders who are now advising Obama includes the question by a retired officer. “Why did the American military establishment so fail to come up with a war-winning strategy that it was up to a retired general and a civilian think thank…to do their job? This is a stunning indictment of the American military’s top leadership.”