Word: iraq
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Adventure in Iraq...
...potent political trope here because it is rooted in grievances. Just down the road from the Khomeini shrine is the Behesht-e Zahra martyrs' cemetery--one of many such scattered plots that contain the remains of more than 200,000 Iranian soldiers who died in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The widows and mothers who come here on Thursdays--the beginning of the weekend in Iran--to wash graves and pass out sweets and fruit to strangers remember that the rockets, jets and chemical weapons used to kill their sons and husbands were provided to Saddam Hussein...
History is written by the victors, and that's plainly the case in Tom Ricks' gritty volume on the surge phase of the Iraq war. Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno are the flawed but authentic heroes who pushed through a strategy to suppress Iraq's festering civil war; the losers are warlords like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who agitated for the invasion and then lost control over its outcome through naiveté or ineptitude. Much of the Beltway intrigue here was reported by Ricks' Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward in last year's The War Within. Military strategies--even...
Though Gates was hired by George W. Bush to clean up the mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates' greatest legacy may come in what he calls a "strategic reshaping" that better outfits the U.S. military to wage coming wars. Future weapons buys must "be driven more by the actual capabilities of potential adversaries," Gates told Congress a few weeks ago, "and less by what is technologically feasible given unlimited time and resources." Pentagon procurement, he said, is plagued by a "risk-averse culture, a litigious process, parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability and sometimes adversarial...
...with the Air Force before. Shortly after arriving at the Pentagon in late 2006, he pushed to boost production of unmanned aircraft for use in intelligence work, only to run into the Air Force's long-standing love of manned fighters. But Gates' hunch was vindicated in Afghanistan and Iraq, where cheaper, unmanned Predator and Reaper drones have been flying around the clock but expensive F-22s have yet to appear. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlap Jr. has written that drones are "game-changing" because of their unprecedented ability to loiter for hours, waiting for the enemy to reveal...