Review: The Forever War, Tell Me How This Ends

Abstract

THE FOREVER WAR Dexter Filkins New York: Knopf, 2008. 384pp, $28.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0307266392)TELL ME HOWTHIS ENDS General David Petraeus and Search for a Way Out of Iraq Linda Robinson New York: Public Affairs, 2008.432pp, $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-1586485283)Signs of progress in Iraq today are abundant but fragile. Former insurgents have rejected al Qaeda and are in reconciliation talks with Shiitedominated government. The government itself recently negotiated a bilateral security pact with United States, setting 2011 as withdrawal date for American troops. Violence levels have been declining steadily since 2007.The country's turnaround has been remarkable. After 2003 invasion, poor planning for postwar occupation allowed a bloody insurgency against coalition troops, Iraqi government, and ordinary civilians to take hold. For four years that followed, news out of Iraq focused almost exclusively on suicide and car bombings, sectarian killings and atrocities, and ascendancy of al Qaeda terrorism. The American-led coalition seemed powerless to protect Iraqi civilians and infrastructure.New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins worked in Baghdad during this period. Rather than sheltering in his office, he travelled across Iraq to witness events firsthand. shadowed American troops, met Iraqi officials, and spoke to ordinary citizens whose lives had been shattered by violence. His memoir of his experiences, The Forever War, is a collection of vignettes, with each chapter devoted to a particular event or theme from his time in Iraq. describes following US marines through 2004 battle to retake Fallujah, a narrow escape from kidnappers, regular death-defying runs in sweltering heat of Baghdad night, and close encounters with hostile Iraqis.Filkins lets events speak for themselves, describing them without passing judgment. His writing is immediate and intense. recounts a conversation with an American soldier whose unit had accidentally killed an Iraqi woman: He watched one of women standing near an Iraqi soldier drop to ground.... 'I'm sorry,' Sergeant Schrumpf said, shaking his head. 'But chick was in way' (91). Describing aftermath of a suicide bombing, he notes that the craziest thing... were heads - how head of bomber often remained intact after explosion. It was result of some weird law that only a physicist could explain: force of blast would detach bomber's head and throw it up and away, too fast for blast to destroy it. So there it would be, head, sitting on a pile of bricks or underneath a telephone pole (172).The book is refreshingly modest, a rare quality in literature on Iraq War. Filkins does not claim to be an expert, only a witness, and he refrains from preaching or editorializing. The drawback of this approach, however, is that it offers no overarching conclusions about war. Readers looking for a grand argument will finish book feeling frustrated. But those searching for a vivid account of war's moral ambiguity and reality of life on ground during worst years of insurgency should welcome Filkins's work.Linda Robinson, a former writer for US News and World Report, takes a different approach in Tell Me How This Ends, a sweeping account of 2007-08 surge of American forces under General David Petraeus's command. …