It does indeed seem like the COIN bubble has burst. Here, it is important to make the distinction between “COIN” and “counterinsurgency.” As Sebastian L. v. Gorka and David Kilcullen have argued, “COIN” is the selective, distinctly American reading of conflicts that produced one distorted model of population-centric counterinsurgency and “counterinsurgency” is something else altogether. If this “COIN” had authorized historian, it would be Thomas Ricks and his Fiasco and The Gamble the history; this is the story, the narrative. Except not everyone bought it. Carl Prine, for example, has been poking holes in this ‘story’ for a long time (see “Peaches for Dessert” and “Twinkle, Twinkle“). Well, it turns out Ricks is not so sure any more either:
I admit it: When I was writing The Gamble I thought for a while that such a residual force was the way to go. But with the passage of the years since then I increasingly have come to believe that the Iraqis were simply sitting around keeping their powder dry and waiting for Uncle Sam to get out of the way, so they could sort themselves out. Remember, the surge was half a war ago — it began five years ago, in January 2007. Iraq was given a lot of time. I do not see what keeping 15,000 troops there for another year or two would do that it did not do in 2009 or 2010. Plus, President Obama was not elected to keep us in Iraq; he was elected, in part, to get us out. So it would be pretty hard to keep troops there without a clear indication that it would do any good. Especially since Iraqis seemed to want us out.
The time to get this right was five years ago. The story Ricks told promoted a narrative that perpetuated a policy that was very likely wrong, and now he glibly retracts his argument with the benefit of hindsight. There is nothing smart or courageous in being right in retrospect. Recanting the narrative of The Gamble now strikes me more as scrambling to continue “being right” than “getting it right.”
