Just as my respect for today's academicians threatens to improve

I think Judith Miller is a terrible reporter. Can I extend that opinion to include you and all other reporters?

leads me to conclude that you wrote a tome on Texas Hold 'Em poker. Then again, I only read the top three inches of the cover. Look for my review in this weekend's New York Review of Books.

This incident tells me that your assessment of our civilian academic institutions may not be completely warranted.

The truth is: anyone with a high-school degree should be able to distinguish between a "fact" and an "opinion," and should therefore be able to summarize somebody's (in that case, yours) argument before adding their own opinion on it (Mr. Prashad). Actually, my second-grader is now learning to make that distinction!!

Pascale

That's the claim of the jaded author of Jarhead, which was made into a movie...

Whether The Gamble's description of the 'surge' was successful depends on what your needs were, how the fact or myth can be harnessed. The last admin achieved the fact of a 'decent interval', and built a myth of success, separating them from the blame to be laid on the next guy.

For a thousand service families, some of them not even citizens, Sami or Jose won't be coming home. And for tens of thousands more, he'll not be the same. The current cohort has it better, but the next one draws Pashtunistan.

Baghdad is now a gutted and smoky room, not a fully involved house afire. But probably not yet safe for a million refugees to pick thru the pieces, so the fire-line tape stays up.

As a matter of fan interest, what's happening with the movie rights for The Gamble? Celebrity has its cost.

x

"I had in mind the section in my book beginning on page 295 titled "The Surge Falls Short," in which I concluded that the surge "succeeded tactically but fell short strategically."

The word (two choices) you're missing in that phrase is "succeeded tactically" (and "Temporally" or "Temporarily") but fell short strategically."

Juan Cole - Informed Comment

Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sadr City Car Bombs Kill 41; Violence in Baghdad returns to 2008 Levels

In full

Dear Tom,
My full response to you on April 23 was the following:

"Dear Tom,
Thanks for your email.

I’m sorry to have almost caused bodily harm. That was not my intention.

I suppose “great victory” should have appeared in quotes. It is a direct echo of Tariq Aziz’s comment in February 1998 that the deal regarding the UN (UNSCOM) and the Saddam regime was a “great victory,” which of course it was in one sense (that the US would not pursue regime change) but not in another (the sanctions would continue to pillage Iraqi society). In the same way, I felt that your book acknowledges that the occupation will last several decades (I can read), but that the current strategy has succeeded in holding down the sectarian conflict, and if the US leaves the country Iraq will be plunged into interminable war. That’s the “great victory.”

I am interested in your comment that you conclude that the “surge failed.” My reading of your book leads me to conclude that you write that the surge did succeed (even if only in terms of this “great victory”) but, as you say at the end of the book, the surge is not the great event for which this war will be remembered. It is this contradiction that interested me, this high praise for the prosecution of the surge, and yet this uncertainty about it.

Best Wishes,
Vijay."

As you say above, and in the book, you believe that the Surge was a tactical success, even if a strategic failure. I think you are wrong on the first score. I have written about this in New Left Review, while reviewing Patrick Cockburn's super book on Sadrism. What I was interested in is this importation of the Surge as tactic to Afghanistan.
I cannot understand the analytical advantage of saying that it was a tactical success, but a strategic failure -- if it is a strategic failure, then what is the value of its tactical "success"? At most a pyrrhic victory? "One more such victory would utterly undo him," as Pyrrhus said.

Be well, Vijay.

As a fire officer in the summer wars of the west (Wildfires) we can make exceptionally good tactical maneuvers on any given operational period. Strategically though we make (not all the time)insufficient progress in the over all objective;lessening the impact of fire disasters. In fact tactical decisions exacerbate the over all fire problem on many incidents.

Yes there is a big difference! And yes there are consequences from either modality.

Two points:
(1) The difference between tactics and strategy is not *only* about time scales. Obviously tactics are subsumed under a larger strategy; but this is not what distinguishes tactics from strategies. They are distinguished by, among other things, the following: a strategy is an overall understanding of how to operate against an adversary, in a military conflict, how to exercise the art of war to exercise political power over that adversary; a tactic is the exercise of military force on the battlefield or in the theater of combat. So, a strategy could either encompass the entire conflict (World War II) or it could be about winning the Dardanelles to break the alliance between the Ottomans and the Germans (in World War 1). The winning of the Dardanelles would not have been simply a military victory, but a political one. The tactics are set up to match the greater strategic objective.
(2) Your book, Fiasco, perfectly demonstrated how there was a limited appreciation for strategic thinking among the political leaders of the military, and so that even if there were tactical successes on the battlefield, these were of no use to the overall (absent) strategic goals of US foreign policy (I have written about how the US tactical operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have delivered a strategic victory to Iran; this is one example of the stratagems of war). In this book, The Gamble, I believe that you have shown us how the political leaders of the military have collapsed tactics (tactical force to bring down violence) with a strategy (to bring down violence). In this sense, if there is a tactical victory (bringing down violence levels *for US troops*), then, to their mind, there is a strategic victory: the "grand victory," in other words. Your book, therefore, could be read to suggest that the Surge is not only a set of tactics, but a strategy in itself - this despite your own caveat over the unsustainable nature of the Surge. Michael Massing read it this way in the NYRB, for instance.
In addition, the violence levels could have come down as a result of the Sadrist refoundation (as I have written in New Left Review), of the exhaustion of the sectarian conflict to some extent, and of the political maneuvers of the Maliki government -- not just the tactical elements of the Surge. In other words, the violence levels could have been reduced serendipitiously. Any export of this "strategy" to Afghanistan will not necessarily succeed, if indeed the success of the tactical elements only happened because of the various events around the Surge.
Best Wishes,
Vijay.

Mr. Ricks,

Michael Oakeshott argues that people have their own way of seeing the world based on their own assumptions and tools. Each method of assumptions and tools is a mode of thinking: like art, science, and religion. Coming from a family where nearly every generation has served in the military, I think the military constitutes its own mode. (Of course, one could argue institutionalization, but really that is more a method of socialization.)Some people can skip from mode to mode, as you seem to do, and some cannot. It appears to me the argument is of this sort, along with the issues with academics.