Bridge on the river Euphrates.(The Forever War )(Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies)(Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq)(Book review)

Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 384 pp., $25.00,

Peter W. Galbraith, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 224 pp., $23.00.

Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 432 pp., $27.95.

IN LATE 2006, as the National Security Council (NSC) debated the need for the troop escalation and change in Iraq policy commonly known as the "surge," they didn't call it that. They called it the "bridge." It had become agonizingly clear that President Bush's plan to have U.S. forces "stand down" as the Iraqis "stood up" had failed. Iraq had fallen into sectarian civil war, and the hastily rebuilt Iraqi security forces (ISF) were not only incapable of providing order, but were in many instances agents of chaos themselves. The goal of the surge was to have U.S. forces take the lead in providing population security in Baghdad, buying time for political accord and strengthening the ISF. The surge, in short, was never meant to be a permanent state, but rather a bridge back to the original goal: transitioning security responsibilities to the Iraqis.

Travelling across Iraq as the surge ended this summer, it was clear that security conditions had dramatically improved since the dark days of 2006 and early 2007. Visiting joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and Mosul, visiting Iraqi forces in the former "triangle of death," touring Basra with the Iraqi Army, and speaking with dozens of American and Iraqi commanders and officials, it was also clear that the ISF have made great strides. Despite these enormous gains, however, no one in Iraq was doing a victory lap. The war is not over, and the deep political conflicts at the root of Iraq's ethno-sectarian tensions have not been resolved. The fragile calm that has descended on the country could be undone if the United States fails to effectively push Iraqi leaders to reach a broader political accord. As the Bush administration winds to a dose, it will be up to the next president to cross the bridge provided by the surge, and do so in a way that leads to lasting stability.

NUMEROUS BOOKS have catalogued the series of blunders contributing to Iraq's descent into disaster, but none more effectively than Dexter Filkins's The Forever War. Filkins's brutally honest account is based on his three-and-a-half years of reporting from Iraq for the New York Times. Filkins lived in the "red zone," regularly embedded with U.S. troops, and was one of the few American journalists present during the ferocious November 2004 Falluiah offensive. For the most part, Filkins does not give a thirty-thousand-foot view of Iraq. Instead, he provides a ground-level, mud- and blood-soaked eyewitness account in the very best tradition of war reporting. Filkins's narrative unfolds in a nonlinear, back-and-forth style that gives the reader a feel for combat, a feel for the Iraqi street and a feel for a country slipping away.

Filkins crossed into Iraq at the outset of the invasion and saw firsthand how too few troops and too little planning led to chaos. Watching Iraqis loot computers and just about everything else from the Iraqi Olympic