By Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks. Ricks' reporting posits that, first, US military activity in Iraq in 2003-2006 was so utterly counterproductive to US aims that Bin Laden couldn't have asked for anything more. He covered that in his previous book, so this book is about "the surge". The surge is several things first, sending all available US troops to Iraq (amount to roughly 35,000, but the surge architects would have takes double that if the troops had been available). Second, a major change in US tactics, directed by General Petreus and amounting to using counter-insurgency methods , as opposed to ... not using counter-insurgency methods. The key elements of the new tactics are bribing Sunni insurgents to change sides, and changing priorities from trying to kill "bad guys" to trying to protect the Iraqi civilian population. The surge also benefited from Moqtada al-Sadr's decision to reduce his militia's level of attacks, and from the simple fact that most ethnic cleansing was already finished. The effect of the surge was to drastically reduce daily violence, but it leaves all of the major factions in Iraq completely unreconciled and fully armed, and may have simply postponed an inevitable civil war.

The book is extremely readable and I highly recommend it. It contains many details worth knowing, such as a thorough indictment of essentially every major military decision-maker from the Secretary of Defense to the Chiefs of Staff to the generals, from 2003 to 2006. Its main flaw is that it's simply the story of the second batch of generals, as told to this reporter. While those generals certainly seem to bring enough realism and pessimism to the story to make it plausible, Ricks is working through a very narrow perspective. He does mention negatives about the heroes of his story (Petreus and Odierno, primarily), and he is clear that he believes that while surge succeeded in buying time, that time won't be used for anything positive.

But the problem is not one of having enough bad things to "balance" the good things. As readers we depend on Ricks' judgment of what to mention in 300 pages to give an accurate impression of his years of research, both factually and emotionally. But the vast majority of his sources were either second-wave military leaders in Iraq and pro-war think-tanks, so he simply couldn't have enough information to make those judgments, no matter how plausibly realistic and self-critical the current military leaders seem to be, and we in turn must read between the lines for clues on how to weight Ricks' opinions. Ricks is as generous to his sources as he is harsh toward their predecessors, and his sources include some neo-cons, such as Fred Kagan, who clearly merit a far more critical approach.

Even with those caveats, the perspective he does provide is certainly a valuable one and one that belongs in any evaluation of the war, and the book is excellently done.