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Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton all agreed. The "surge" — sending an additional 30,000 U.S. soldiers to Iraq in a last-ditch effort to end the spiral of worsening violence — was a plan they had all opposed. And in September 2007, they all agreed, it wasn't working.

In The Gamble, Thomas Ricks traces the risky, narrowly won battles, some of them in Iraq, many of them in Washington, inside the Pentagon and for the ear of former president George W. Bush, that averted American defeat in Iraq. The Gamble — sending tens of thousands of extra troops and changing the mission from chasing bad guys to the classic counter-insurgency strategy of protecting the population by living among it — hasn't guaranteed victory, but it has produced no end of sweet irony and offers a glimpse of what can be expected next in Afghanistan.

"We should stop the surge and start bringing the troops home," said Biden, then a veteran Democrat senator and now vice-president. It was a view echoed by the junior senator who would become president and a former first lady who is now secretary of state.

The witness before them, in a dress green uniform encrusted with decorations, in the Senate Foreign Relations hearing room in Sept., 2007, was the slight, cerebral Gen. David Petraeus, just back from the fighting in Baghdad. He was trying to persuade a deeply skeptical Congress and openly hostile Democrats that the surge was working and should be allowed to continue.

That morning, MoveOn.org, the anti-war group, bought a full-page ad in The New York Times. It dubbed the architect of the surge and the general who re-wrote the army's counter-insurgency manual, "General Betray Us."

Fast forward to last fall and Candidate Obama wanted nothing more than an iconic shot of himself riding high above Baghdad, peering out of a Black Hawk helicopter alongside America's newest military hero, Gen. Petraeus, the man now charged with salvaging Afghanistan, the war the new president says is, unlike Iraq, worth fighting and winning.

Ricks is a military correspondent for the Washington Post. His brilliant and devastating book Fiasco detailed the arrogance, idiocy and stubbornness — both in the military high command and among their political masters — that undermined the occupation and pacification of Iraq post-"shock and awe."

In The Gamble, he traces the course of three crucial battles. In the first, there is what amounts to a quiet revolution inside the U.S. military against the failed strategy, and ham-fisted insistence on prolonging it that was the trademark of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his acolytes. Petraeus plays a key role. Back from Iraq, where he had commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion, he was sent to Leavenworth, Kan., to command the U.S. army's education establishment. There he gathered a diverse and impressive group of thinkers, strategists and historians to craft a new counter-insurgency doctrine.

It was both bold and a return to basics hard-learned by the British in Malaya and the French in Indo-China. Reduced to its essential core, winning places the highest priority on protecting the population, not hunting down insurgents. Killing bad guys often simply recruits more bad guys. For U.S. soldiers and Marines, it required more risks, more casualties.

Petraeus surrounded himself with a collection of characters, including David Kilcullen, a free-wheeling Australian counter-insurgency expert, and Emma Sky, a British academic, who was viscerally opposed to the war and pretty anti-American.

Col. Kilcullen breezily outlined a complete reversal of U.S. fighting policy, which had, until then, relied on killing forays from heavily-defended bases. "The most fundamental rule of counterinsurgency is to be there … living in your sector, in close proximity to the population … [rather than] driving around in an armoured convoy, day-tripping like a tourist in Hell."

In 2006, America was losing the war in Iraq and Americans had lost patience with Bush. Getting out became the rallying cry of Democrats.

The second battle was the fight to convince Bush to reverse course, to listen, not to Rumsfeld, but to a handful of outsiders and to bet the war — and perhaps his place in history — on their advice.

In a masterful unveiling of the murky ways Washington often works, Ricks traces how a handful of think-tank experts, retired general and academics eventually convinced an embattled president that the only chance to avert defeat in Iraq was to stake everything — the Gamble — on a surge of troops that would put platoon-size units living among Iraqis in every Baghdad neighbourhood.

It worked. Rumsfeld was dumped. Petraeus was sent to Iraq. So were 30,000 more troops. Those already there had their deployment extended.

The third battle (campaign really) was fought for more than a year, mostly in Baghdad. Casualties soared but slowly the balance tipped. Ricks (like Petraeus) is far too experienced in affairs military and far too familiar with the bitter divisions both inside Iraq and across the Middle East to declare victory. But Iraq today is far more peaceful and its prospects more promising that either the surge's opponents, such as Obama, or its more ardent backers could have predicted two years ago.

"He is the pre-eminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation and precisely the man we need in this command at this time," Robert Gates, the man Bush picked to replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and who was asked by Mr. Obama to stay on as Defense Secretary.

So Petraeus now heads Centcom, the U.S. regional command that includes the war in Afghanistan. It's President Obama's preferred war, and Gates has already promised to double U.S. troops there — a surge that is proportionately even greater than the one in Iraq.

And the array of skeptical, almost scornful Democrats who gave Petraeus a rough ride in the Senate in 2007 now need him to craft a winning strategy, or at least an honourable exit from Afghanistan.

Ricks's vivid, often gripping, accounts of unseemly turf fights inside the Beltway and young soldiers dying and killing in the heat and dust and blood of Baghdad are both compelling and instructive. Compelling as fresh history, still unfolding. Instructive, because it may be a harbinger of Obama's war-fighting approach.

In the early days of the Iraq war, Petraeus is said to have asked a reporter embedded with his division, "Tell me how this ends." It's a question President Obama might well put to America's newest celebrity general, who is now running both the endgame in Iraq and the worsening, widening war in Afghanistan.

Canadians too will be interested in the answer, especially if Petraeus wants U.S. and allied troops to use the same strategy of "protect the population" by getting out of fortified bases and living in small groups among the locals to combat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

Paul Koring is The Globe's international security and foreign affairs correspondent based in Washington .He has covered wars in the Middle east since Iran-Iraq in the 1980s.