Ricks opens his account with an example of the first, failed approach. In late 2005, US Marines were patrolling in Haditha, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad. After one of them was killed by a roadside bomb, the other Marines "began moving toward the houses along the road, 'running and gunning' in Marine parlance." Twenty-four Iraqis, including a 1-year-old child and an old man in a wheelchair, ended up dead. The author sums up the approach this way: "Protect yourself at all costs, focus on attacking the enemy, and treat the Iraqi civilians" as potentially dangerous.
By late 2006, US forces in Iraq were demoralized and directionless, reports Ricks. "The Gamble" recounts how a few passionate men and women, some of them skeptics about the initial 2003 invasion, would alter US military strategy by going around the chain of command and appealing directly to the White House.
At the center of the story is General David Petraeus, an intellectual who wrote the military's manual on counter-insurgency. He, along with retired general Jack Keane, would push for a counterinsurgency strategy: "You must protect the people and separate them from the insurgents, and to do so you had to live among the population. And doing all that required a lot of troops." Petraeus wanted US troops out of their big bases and armored vehicles, moving freely among the Iraqi population, building relationships that would foster better intelligence gathering.
Of course, there was opposition to Petraeus's idea. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Petraeus's boss, General George Casey Jr., both disliked it. But Petraeus's biggest ally was the obvious failure of the old strategy. Both he and Keane appealed directly to President Bush to make a change. After the 2006 midterm elections resulted in significant Republican losses, Bush fired Rumsfeld and opened the way for Petraeus's "surge."
