The Gamble, Thomas E. Ricks
The Gamble, Thomas E. Ricks
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The Gamble
General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008

Author: Thomas E. Ricks

Narrator: James Lurie

Abridged: 10 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 02/10/2009


Synopsis

Fiasco, Thomas E. Ricks’s #1 New York Times bestseller, transformed the political dialogue on the war in Iraq—The Gamble is the next news breaking installment

Thomas E. Ricks uses hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with top officers in Iraq and extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to document the inside story of the Iraq War since late 2005 as only he can, examining the events that took place as the military was forced to reckon with itself, the surge was launched, and a very different war began.

Since early 2007 a new military order has directed American strategy. Some top U.S. officials now in Iraq actually opposed the 2003 invasion, and almost all are severely critical of how the war was fought from then through 2006. At the core of the story is General David Petraeus, a military intellectual who has gathered around him an unprecedented number of officers with both combat experience and Ph.D.s. Underscoring his new and unorthodox approach, three of his key advisers are quirky foreigners—an Australian infantryman-turned- anthropologist, an antimilitary British woman who is an expert in the Middle East, and a Mennonite-educated Palestinian pacifist.

The Gamble offers news-breaking account, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders. We learn that almost every single officer in the chain of command fought the surge. Many of Petraeus’s closest advisers went to Iraq extremely pessimistic, doubting that the surge would have any effect, and his own boss was so skeptical that he dispatched an admiral to Baghdad in the summer of 2007 to come up with a strategy to replace Petraeus’s. That same boss later flew to Iraq to try to talk Petraeus out of his planned congressional testimony. The Gamble examines the congressional hearings through the eyes of Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and their views of the questions posed by the 2008 presidential candidates.

For Petraeus, prevailing in Iraq means extending the war. Thomas E. Ricks concludes that the war is likely to last another five to ten years—and that that outcome is a best case scenario. His stunning conclusion, stated in the last line of the book, is that “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered by us and by the world have not yet happened.”

About The Author

Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the US military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize–winning teams, he covered US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The GeneralsThe Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.James Lurie has narrated for the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Fox, HBO, NBC, and PBS, among others. Lurie has also worked as a musician and a writer, in addition to being a doctoral candidate in Chinese history. As an actor he's had recurring roles on many shows, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Law & Order, Picket Fences, and As The World Turns. He won a Dramalogue Award in Los Angeles for his stage work.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael Gerald on March 24, 2021

The invasion of Iraq was just a pretext for exerting US hegemony in the world, with devastating consequences for the region.......more

Goodreads review by Ken on January 06, 2021

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 Insight from a General's perspective, interesting and comprehensive, what stood out for was one of his change in tactics seems fairly basic (but treat all civilians like human beings & crowd out the space given......more

Goodreads review by Bart on May 25, 2009

This book is a well-reported effort with multiple citations and sources and a somewhat coherent, if ultimately un-hopeful (as opposed to hopeless), conclusion in its epilogue. For those who read the book as a weather forecast, the epilogue will provide all that you seek. For those that read this book......more

Goodreads review by Steve on February 09, 2010

The best book I've read so far on the conflict(s) in Iraq. I thought about giving this 5 stars, but the last 30 pages or so has Ricks trying to guess where this is all going. Nothing wrong with that, since the situation in Iraq is ongoing (and is now our longest war), but at that point it moves from......more

Goodreads review by Trish on March 16, 2009

Ricks has a thesis--you can guess it from the title--and he makes his point forcefully. It had always been my contention that the people of Iraq must be better served and the concept of sending troops out into small outposts in cities and towns to establish peaceful areas is intuitively convergent.......more