The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 by BOB WOODWARD; TheStrongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq by BING WEST; Tell Me How ThisEnds: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq by LINDA ROBINSONReview by: LAWRENCE D. FREEDMANForeign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 1 (January/February 2009), pp. 186-187Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20699453 .

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Recent Books

because of the superior economic opportu nities elsewhere. Some wish to sever their

contacts with their countries of birth, some

long to return, and most wish to maintain

contact with relatives and friends. Increas

ingly, diasporas are organizing to help economic and even political development in their countries of origin?through philan thropy, through business investment, and even (particularly in postconflict settings) by returning to take up positions in govern ment. This book usefully explores this trend. It draws mainly on the experiences of emigrants from Afghanistan, Armenia, Dominica, Iraq, Liberia, and Morocco, but

it also draws on a modest but rapidly grow ing literature on other emigrant groups. It offers a much richer view of the possibilities than the more traditional emphasis on brain drains versus remittances.

discussion of the crucial issue of trade

dispute settlement: how it works, how much disputants comply with the wto's

rulings, the current deficiencies in the

process, and proposals for improvement? most of which topics generate reasoned

disagreement. This compendium is a use

ful introduction and reference for anyone interested in world trade law. An appendix lists all of the General Agreement on

Tariffs and Trades and the wtos dispute settlement cases and reports through

mid-2007.

Military, Scientific, and Technological

LAWRENCE D. FREEDMAN

The War Within: A Secret White House

History, 2006-2008. by bob

woodward. Simon & Schuster,

2008, 512 pp. $32.00. The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the

Endgame in Iraq, by bing west.

Random House, 2008, 464 pp. $28.00.

Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq, by linda robinson.

PublicAffairs, 2008, 432 pp. $27.95. The final episode of Woodwards chronicle of George W. Bushs journey from 9/11 through the Iraq war starts with the situ ation in Iraq deteriorating and describes the six-month-long effort first to get the

president to pay attention to the possibility of having to write off Iraq as a catastrophic failure of policy and then to decide on a new

strategy. This volume lacks the revelations

of the earlier episodes, and Woodward is coy when it comes to some of the most

The WTO: Governance, Dispute Settlement, and Developing Countries.

edited by merit e. janow, victoria donaldson, and alan

yanovich. Juris Publishing, 2008, 1,100 pp. $125.00.

This capacious volume is the product of a conference at Columbia University of

lawyers, economists, former officials, and

others interested in the fine detail of the law and its practice at the World Trade

Organization. Although the wto has received most of its public attention as the host for the now-stalled and possibly failed Doha Round of multilateral trade

negotiations, in fact it is constandy at work

adjudicating and attempting to resolve trade disputes among its 150 member states.

Some of this book is of course devoted to the Doha Round and to the interests of

developing countries in the world trading system, but two-thirds is devoted to a

[l86] FOREIGN AFFAIRS - Volume88No.i

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Recent Books

sensitive operations, which seem to have

had something to do with targeted assas sinations. With Secretary of Defense

Donald Rumsfeld deflated and eventually departing, there is less drama. Yet The

War Within, with its more coherent and focused story, is the best of Woodwards

quartet. During 2006, with a civil war

taking root in Iraq, the betting might have been on the administrations finding a way to escape from the chaos, whatever

the loss of face. But Bush had invested so much in the war that once he was offered a plausible alternative promising some

thing closer to victory, it was irresistible.

The access Woodward had to top players gave him his unique advantage, although Bush must have wondered why he kept talking to a reporter who has done him few favors. The indictment of the insou

ciant Bushs alarming reliance on his gut instincts has now become familiar, but what

is striking here is how much the case for the "surge" developed independently of the

military chain of command.

As he does not really spend much time

examining the conditions in Iraq, Wood ward does not dwell on the factors that have left the country with a more optimistic prognosis. Improvement was not so much

the result of extra troops or of the intelli

gence with which they were deployed, although these were undoubtedly impor tant. It had more to do with the extent

to which the Iraqis turned away from the

logic of civil war, notably because of a

strong reaction among the Sunnis to the

brutality of al Qaeda and a recognition among senior Shiite figures that Muqtada al-Sadr was acquiring, through his militia, too much control over the political agenda.

These developments necessitated a much

more subtle approach to Iraqi politics than

the established U.S. policy of handing responsibility back to the Iraqi government as soon as possible, whether or not it was

able to cope.

West, a Vietnam veteran who has made

numerous visits to Iraq, provides a full account of how the war has appeared to

those doing the fighting. He complains of strategies that ask the military to do too much with too little while misrepre senting the scale of the problem and the ease of the available solutions. His first two chapters, "How to Create a Mess" and

"Descent Into Chaos," open his scathing

critique of a political and military leader

ship that put soldiers in impossible situa tions. Only as the troops were able to pick up on and work with the changing char acter of local politics did they make real

progress. Then they could take advantage of being, as one Iraqi colonel put it, "the

strongest tribe."

The basic themes of both these ac counts are confirmed by Robinson. Her

focus is on General David Petraeus, the

former top commander of U.S. forces in

Iraq, who now gets most of the credit for turning around the situation on the

ground. Petraeus had worked effectively in the Mosul area in the immediate after

math of the 2003 invasion and was known

both for his frustration at the cavalier alienation of the Sunnis by the Coalition Provisional Authority and for his cham

pioning of sophisticated thinking about

counterinsurgency. Although her atten

tion is set on the high-achieving general and his steely focus on the task at hand, Robinson also does a good job of setting the scene and explaining the many factors that let the first glimmers of light into what had been unremitting gloom.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS January/February 2000 [187]

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