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Summary
Summary
Eagerly anticipated in the wake of their national best seller Cobra II ("The superb, must-read military history of the invasion of Iraq"--Thomas L. Friedman), The Endgame is Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor's most ambitious and news-breaking book to date. A peerless work of investigative journalism and historical recreation ranging from 2003 to 2012, it gives us the first comprehensive, inside account of arguably the most widely reported yet least understood war in American history--from the occupation of Iraq to the withdrawal of American troops.
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Prodigiously researched, The Endgame is not only based on an abundance of highly classified, still-secret government documents but is also brilliantly informed by access to key figures in the White House, the military, the State and Defense departments, the intelligence community, and, most strikingly, by extensive interviews with both Sunni and Shiite leaders, key Kurdish politicians, tribal sheikhs, former insurgents, Sadrists, and senior Iraqi military officers, whose insights about critical turning points and previously unknown decisions made during the war have heretofore been conspicuously missing from the media's coverage of it.
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The Endgame is riveting as a blow-by-blow chronicle of the fighting. It is also relentlessly revealing, as it deftly pieces together the puzzle of the prosecution of American, Iraqi, and Iranian objectives, and the diplomatic intrigue and political struggle within Iraq since the American invasion.
Author Notes
Bernard Edmund Trainor was born in a Manhattan, New York on September 2, 1928. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1946 as a private. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Holy Cross College in 1951 and a master's degree in history from the University of Colorado in 1963.
He was an infantry platoon commander in the Korean War and served two tours in Vietnam, as an adviser to a Vietnamese special operations group and later as a battalion commander. Upon his promotion to lieutenant general in 1983, he became the deputy chief of staff for plans, policies, and operations at Marine Corps headquarters in the Pentagon. He retired from the Marines in July 1985.
He was the military correspondent for The New York Times from 1986 to 1990 and an analyst for ABC News and NBC News. He and Michael R. Gordon wrote three books entitled The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, and The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama. He died from cancer on June 2, 2018 at the age of 89.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A solid chronicle of the Iraq War, emphasizing military maneuvers and Iraqi participation at all levels. Co-authors of previous military histories (Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, 2006, etc.), chief military correspondent Gordon and former Marine Corps lieutenant general Trainor fashion a meticulous record of the nine years of conflict between the "inside-out" versus "outside-in" strategies of the U.S. government in dealing with Iraqi intransigence and conversion to democracy. The authors build a deliberate, chronological construction of events. From 2003, when President George W. Bush's administration embraced the invasion of Iraq as part of a multipronged "freedom agenda," to 2011, when President Barack Obama resolved to extricate the U.S. from the unpopular military exigencies, the government grappled with balancing the urgency for stability by military means and the need to bolster the Iraqis' own system of government and security. Despite the wealth of resources, materiel and advisers injected into the invasion effort, the provisional government that Jerry Bremer III put in place was not functioning within a few weeks and an insurgency was gaining hold, often killing American troops. The authors take great pains to delineate the makeup of the Iraqi government in the prickly transition to sovereignty. For generals from Casey to Petraeus, one fixer to the next, "the specter of Vietnam had haunted the American military for so long that it was hard to imagine that anything good might have come out of the war." The authors, with their combined military experience, try to find those salvaging glimmers. A straightforward, evenhanded account of the nine-year slog that began as a "war of choice" and became "a war of necessity."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
TWO graphs introduce the text of "The Endgame," Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor's instructive yet analytically shallow account of the Iraq war after the fall of Baghdad. The first depicts weekly attacks in Iraq from early 2004 to mid-2010, the second civilian deaths from January 2006 to May 2010. The graphs present identical images: bad news getting worse until early 2007, then pronounced improvement. The message is clear: In early 2007 a decided turn occurred. As with the Civil War after Gettysburg or the war in the Pacific after Midway, a conflict that had been going badly suddenly started heading in the right direction. In early 2007, of course, Gen. David H. Petraeus had arrived in Baghdad to assume command of all coalition forces. Petraeus brought a revised strategy known as counterinsurgency, or COIN, that he himself had played a key role in formulating (or at least rediscovering). Soon thereafter, additional United States forces began deploying to the war zone. All of this - a new commander, revised strategy, more troops - formed what has since become enshrined as the "surge." Groups and individuals invested in the proposition that the surge "worked" - many members of the officer corps, most Republicans and virtually all neoconservatives - will welcome "The Endgame" as an account sustaining their conviction that the Iraq war, however belatedly, ended up in the win column. While by no means overlooking the egregious blunders occurring along the way, Gordon and Trainor grant that claim a qualified endorsement. Not insignificantly, they title their concluding chapter "Mission Accomplished." Yet to accept any such verdict - no matter how narrowly defined the mission - is to misconstrue the war's outcome and significance. As chroniclers of combat, Gordon and Trainor make a formidable team. Both are seasoned journalists, with Trainor having the added credential of being a retired Marine three-star general. Gordon is the chief military correspondent of The New York Times, and Trainor worked for the paper from 1986 to 1990. "The Endgame" completes their Iraq trilogy. The first two volumes - "The Generals' War" (1995), dealing with Operation Desert Storm, and "Cobra II" (2006), which focused on the 2003 invasion - covered events from the battlefield back to the White House, but were notable for their stringent criticism of senior American military leaders. When it comes to evaluating general officer performance, the two are not dazzled by the press-briefing version of events. Here again their narrative extends from Washington to the fighting front, while drawing on an astonishing array of classified documents. (The arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning apparently did little to curb the military's penchant for leaking secrets.) "The Endgame" seeks to "provide the most comprehensive account to date" of the events it describes. It achieves that. Even so, where it matters most, the authors come up short. Future historians may well classify the surge as a myth concocted to perpetuate a fraud. The myth centers on the claim that a strategy devised in Washington and implemented by a brilliant general saved the day. The fraud is that a 20-year military effort to determine the fate of Iraq yielded something approximating a positive outcome. Although "The Endgame" provides an abundance of evidence to demolish the myth, Gordon and Trainor shy away from doing so. With the American public and political elites inclined simply to forget the Iraq war, "The Endgame" provides a rationale for doing just that. "The paternity of the surge would be long debated," Gordon and Trainor write, "all the more so once it became clear that it succeeded militarily." They are surprisingly reluctant to resolve that debate. More surprising still is their willingness to accept the verdict of success. In fact, the term used to describe the campaign that American forces pursued beginning in 2007 is a misnomer. Rather than a "surge," something like an "accommodation" is more apt, capturing the shift to buying off insurgents instead of seeking to defeat them. As Gordon and Trainor make clear, the impetus for the so-called Sunni Awakening came from the bottom up rather than the top down. "In practice," they write, "it was not generals but leaders at the battalion and company level" who took the initiative in cutting deals with warlords. Paying off the enemy did not appear among the principles touted by General Petraeus's famous counterinsurgency manual. His contribution was to put his seal of approval on actions instigated by subordinates wrestling with earlier failures of American generalship. MEANWHILE, responsibility for killing those who could not be bought - chiefly foreign fighters filling the ranks of Al Qaeda in Iraq - fell increasingly to the special operations forces commanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As Gordon and Trainor make clear, and as McChrystal's memoir "My Share of the Task" recounts in graphic detail, the process of honing "black ops" capabilities had begun long before the surge. Here too, Petraeus inherited and exploited improvements for which others also deserve credit. Taking command at a moment when American efforts in Iraq were manifestly failing, Petraeus identified a path that avoided abject defeat. This rates as no small achievement. Yet avoiding defeat should not be confused with winning. Back in Washington, the Bush administration was intent on pretending otherwise. To shore up flagging public support for the war, it published a White Paper entitled "The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," based on "the mantra of clear, hold and build." But this was, according to Gordon and Trainor, simply "an egregious bit of deceptive advertising" cooked up by the White House staff. Coined to suggest that the administration had finally formulated a coherent blueprint for success, it amounted to little more than "an elaborate bumper sticker." In truth, victory no longer defined the objective. In overthrowing Saddam Hussein, Bush had sought to "upset the established order to spread the gospel of freedom." By 2007, the administration had deep-sixed such grand ambitions. "Behind closed doors, defeating the insurgency was not the goal," the authors write. "Rather, the goal was to whittle it down to manageable proportions so that the Iraqi forces could handle the fight for a protracted period." This accurately describes what Petraeus and his successors achieved: they "tamped down the violence," thereby "tamping down the sectarian infighting," which enabled them to "tamp down the crisis." In short, the surge stanched the bleeding, allowing the White House to congratulate itself on a job well done. To distract attention from the mistakes and consequences of the war, the administration - with eager news media collaboration - elevated Petraeus to the status of cult figure. The retired Army general Jack Keane, a behind-the-scenes promoter of the surge and of Petraeus himself, "had argued that with so much going wrong in the war he American public needed a hero." For such a role, the shrewd Petraeus, equally adept at cultivating journalists and courting politicians, came right out of central casting. Installing him alongside the likes of Ulysses S. Grant and George Patton in the pantheon of American greats helped refurbish an image of United States military prowess badly battered by actual events in Iraq. That "The Endgame" includes no graphs tallying cumulative war costs and casualties or correlating recent American economic woes with the Iraq war's duration qualifies as somehow fitting. After a brief gestation period, the misbegotten Iraq war gave birth to its own misbegotten offspring, namely, naïve faith in the generalissimo as war-redeemer. The principal beneficiary and victim of this idea was McChrystal, tapped by President Obama in 2009 to save the day in Afghanistan as Petraeus had purportedly done in Iraq. Heralded at the time of his appointment as cut from the Petraeus mold, McChrystal lasted barely a year in the job, felled by - take your pick - a) an unethical reporter with an ax to grind; or b) his own obtuseness. In either case, before he had effected an Afghan turnaround, McChrystal's military career came to a crashing halt "My Share of the Task" offers little to suggest that success was in the offing regardless of how long he might have stayed in the job. Over the course of five years spent fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, McChrystal had demonstrated an impressive aptitude for military tactics. Afghanistan, however, required something more. Job 1 was to design a comprehensive campaign that was political as well as military. Persuaded (mistakenly) that counterinsurgency had produced magical results in Iraq, McChrystal set out to apply a similar formula in Afghanistan (which resembled Iraq about as much as New Jersey resembles New Mexico). The key to success, he believed, lay in forging "durable, genuine friendships" with Afghan and Pakistani leaders willing to pursue an American-engineered plan for nationbuilding. Although McChrystal cajoled - or maneuvered - President Qbama into giving this a shot, progress by the time he departed Afghanistan was far from clear. His successor in command, Petraeus, fared little better. With Petraeus having since given way to Gen. John R. Allen, scheduled to be replaced in the coming weeks by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the infatuation with counterinsurgency has now run its course, and four-star generals have returned to the ranks of mere mortals, a process punctuated by Petraeus's own recent fall from grace. Of the several occasions when he himself attracted critical attention - the Pat Tillman affair, for example, or the leaking of his Afghan strategic assessment - McChrystal offers explanations that fall somewhere between perfunctory and disingenuous. The truth is that he comes across as a skilled craftsman perhaps but an astonishingly unreflective architect. Few if any senior American officers have spent more time than McChrystal in the post-9/11 combat theaters. Yet as to what those wars have wrought and at what cost to the United States or to others, he is essentially mute. Like Gordon and Trainor, McChrystal represses any inclination to probe too deeply. Andrew J. Bacevich teaches at Boston University. An updated edition of his book "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War" will appear next month.
Choice Review
No one can offer a definitive account of a war in process. However, Cobra II (2006), by New York Times military correspondent Michael Gordon and former Marine Corps lieutenant general and military commentator Bernard Trainor, was the best book on the early years of the Iraq War. Now the two insightful analysts match their previous accomplishment as they update and carry the story forward to the present. They bring to the task their on-the-ground presence at many of the decisive battles; unparalleled access to major military and political players; unprecedented access to classified documents; an exhaustive interview regime of American, British, and Iraqi participants at all levels; and vast understanding of the nature of combat. The availability of the WikiLeaks disclosures provided resources not expected for years or decades. Possibly the most impressive aspect of the book is its insight into the labyrinth and dynamics of internal Iraqi politics, but the authors' treatment of American decision making is also profound. Justly damning the Bush debacle, the authors also criticize Obama's handling of the denouement. Cobra II was described as magisterial; Endgame equally qualifies. This volume is gripping. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. J. P. Dunn Converse College
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue No one book can capture an event as complex as a war, especially a nine-year war in a distant nation that from its outset was permeated by tribal, religious, ethnic, local, and regional politics. Nonetheless, this volume seeks to provide the most comprehensive account to date of the United States' involvement in Iraq. From the start, our goal was to cover Iraq's halting political development as well as the military battles. We gave attention to decisions in Baghdad as well as Washington. And we covered the clashes and political maneuvering from the early days of the American-led occupation, through the descent into sectarian violence, the surge that pulled Iraq back from the brink of civil war, and the vexing aftermath. This was an ambitious project, but we have been covering the Iraq War from the start. Through two American presidents, a succession of Iraqi prime ministers, and a variety of United States commanders, we tracked events on the ground in Iraq and in Washington. We were present for many of the ferocious battles in Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Sadr City, and we covered the nation's political development. We saw American and Iraqi blood spilled, and we interacted with the generals, diplomats, and politicians on whose shoulders the decisions of the war rested. Too many American accounts of the war in Iraq have left out the Iraqis, or cast them as little more than a backdrop for dramas that were played out in Washington or among American commanders in Baghdad. But they are essential actors in their own nation's drama. For this reason, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and rivals like Ayad Allawi, Massoud Barzani, and Adil Abd al-Mahdi share the list of the hundreds of interviews we conducted along with Iraqi generals, police commanders, tribal sheikhs, and student protesters. We also interviewed myriad American and British generals, as well as officers and enlisted troops down to the platoon level. The objective was to weave together battles fought by the troops with closed-door Green Zone and White House meetings from the conflict's earlier days through the military withdrawal in December 2011. More than that, we have sought to explain not just what happened when and where, but why. We have been aided in our task by unprecedented access to classified documents that chronicle the war as it was seen from the American embassy in Baghdad, from the White House, from military headquarters across Iraq, and from the command posts of special operations and intelligence units. The troves of secret documents on which we were able to draw shed light on corners of the Iraq story that would otherwise have remained dark for years. Internal military and State Department reports have provided glimpses of roads not taken and opportunities missed. Firsthand after-action reports and cumulative briefings chart and bring to life the nighttime campaign waged in Iraq by the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters overseeing America's most elite and secretive commando units, both against Sunni insurgents and later against Shiite militias and even the Quds Force, Iran's operations and intelligence arm in Iraq. Still-classified oral histories show the war as commanders recounted it. CIA and other intelligence reports helped complete the mosaic. In painting a picture of America's complicated struggle with Iran in Iraq, for instance, we have been able to draw on General David Petraeus's classified updates to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an unauthorized disclosure that opens a window into the inner workings of the war and describes Petraeus's own third-party interactions with the leader of that force, Qasim Suleimani. Other documents provide rare glimpses of the war through the eyes of those who fought against the United States and the Iraqi government. Detailed reports on the interrogations of Qais and Laith al-Khazali, two Iraqi Shiite militants captured by the British Special Air Service in 2007, offer an inside view of Iraq's Sadrist political movement and militias and its ties to Iran. Transcripts of the interrogations of Sunni insurgents captured by American troops, along with internal reports by insurgent commanders recovered from hard drives and flash drives, have helped us understand the activities of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the local franchise of the global terrorist group that was the United States' main antagonist for much of the war. Heavily classified embassy cables, internal Red Team analyses organized by the American military command, notes of critical meetings in Washington and Baghdad, and classified assessments and war plans commissioned by the generals who prosecuted the war round out our account. We have protected the intelligence community's sources and methods. By combining extensive interviews with this documentary history, we have sought to convey a full and rich history of a tumultuous period that has put its stamp on the American military, has decisively altered the history of Iraq, and that will influence events in the broader Middle East for decades to come. Excerpted from The End Game: The Hidden History of America's Struggle to Build Democracy in Iraq by Michael R. Gordon, Bernard E. Trainor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.