The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq Read online

  Together Forward not only didn’t work, it backfired on Gen. Casey, because it undercut the confidence of Bush administration officials in his ability to deliver. “In July, when Baghdad Security Plan One tanked, they said, ‘We didn’t have enough reliable Iraqi units, they didn’t show up,”’ recalled Feaver, one of the National Security Council staffers working on Iraq. “Over the summer, doubts began to grow among White House officials working on Iraq. By September the NSC staff initiated a quiet but thorough review of strategy with an eye to developing a new way forward.”

  McGurk, the NSC staffer, returned to the White House with doubts not just about the approach but about the people implementing it. He “had lost all faith in our security strategy. MNF-I and the embassy were locked in a corrosive cycle of finger-pointing . . . with nobody asking serious questions about what to do differently.”

  A new iteration, Together Forward II, was launched on August 8. It did nothing to stop the big bombings. Casey called in additional troops from his theater reserve and sent those reinforcements to help clear the city, block by block. The notion was that Iraqi forces then would hold those areas. “Clear, hold, and build” was a phrase that grew out of Col. H. R. McMaster’s successful campaign in the northern Iraqi city of Tall Afar, one of the few bright spots in the war that year. A visiting State Department official picked up the phrase and passed it along to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who used it in congressional testimony. Rumsfeld resisted the phrase, even after the White House adopted it. He argued that it was the job of the Iraqis or the State Department to oversee holding and building, but grudgingly seemed to accept the idea as at least a rhetorical necessity.

  There was little reason to believe that the plan to clear, hold, and build in Baghdad would work any better the second time around. Brig. Gen. John Campbell started in Baghdad as the assistant commander of the 1st Cavalry Division on the day Operation Together Forward II began. He watched as attacks rose steadily despite U.S. efforts. “They went through and cleared, and tried to hold that with Iraqi forces,” Campbell said. “The issue was, we didn’t have enough ISF, both in quantity and quality.”

  The failure to hold meant that the U.S. military was simply repeating the pattern of 2003-5 that Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency analyst, had labeled “kiss of death” operations, in which American forces moved into an area, found cooperative locals, and then, after some improvement of security, pulled out of the area. “Then,” Kilcullen grimly concluded, “insurgents kill those who cooperated with us.”

  White House officials were also concluding that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was impeding success, especially because it wouldn’t allow actions to be taken against Shiite militias, Feaver said. Indeed, after U.S. Army units launched a raid into Sadr City in early August, resulting in a two-hour-long firefight, Maliki angrily appeared on television to apologize for the operation. “This won’t happen again,” he promised. Chiarelli said that Maliki constantly impeded U.S. operations during the summer and fall of 2006. Near the end of the year, for example, U.S. Special Operators would pick up in Baghdad one of the most senior leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, the guard’s wing for foreign Islamic revolutionary operations. He was believed to be involved in planning attacks on U.S. forces and was found at the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of an influential Shiite political party that was a big part of Maliki’s ruling coalition and one of the most prominent politicians in Iraq. U.S. officials were furious when a few days later, Maliki’s government sent the Quds man back to Iran.

  August ended with two days of ferocious bombings, with 27 people killed in the Shorja market, Baghdad’s largest bazaar, on the thirtieth, and then 66 killed the next day as a huge explosion flattened an apartment building in a Shiite neighborhood. Meanwhile, Shiite militiamen battled U.S. troops both in Sadr City and in the southern city of Diwaniyah. The same month saw a 33-day Israeli war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon end in what was widely seen as a military and political setback for Israel, an outcome that only further worried analysts assessing the American position in Iraq.

  Despite the growing violence, Casey continued to insist on a policy that emphasized transition to Iraqi forces. Late in August, he predicted that Iraqi forces would be able to provide security in the country pretty much on their own by late 2007 or early 2008. “I can see—over the next twelve to eighteen months—I can see the Iraqi security forces progressing to a point where they can take on the security responsibilities for the country with very little coalition support,” he said.

  Chiarelli, the number two officer in Iraq, and so commander of day-to-day operations, occupies an ambiguous position in this tale. As the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad during his previous tour, he had done a far better job than most in understanding the principles of counterinsurgency. There were rumors of disagreement between Casey and him over the way forward. Publicly he was entirely supportive of Casey, reiterating in mid-September the view that sending additional U.S. troops was not the answer. “I feel that given the conditions we’ve got in Baghdad, we’ve got the force posture exactly where it needs to be,” he said. On the face of it, there would appear to be little else that he could do, given his subordinate position. Yet just a few months later, Lt. Gen. Odierno would arrive to take over from Chiarelli in that number two slot and effectively challenge Casey as Chiarelli had never done, conducting his own strategic review that ultimately would reverse almost every tenet of American strategy in Iraq. Chiarelli struggled with the number two position; Odierno would redefine it.

  Sadi Othman, who would become one of Petraeus’s closest advisers in Iraq, said that in retrospect, neither American officials nor Iraqi leaders understood just how dangerous the situation was in 2006. “I think people knew the situation was bad, but they didn’t know it was very, very bad,” he said in 2008. “The Americans didn’t get out of the Green Zone. The government of Iraq didn’t get out. And we didn’t have troops on the streets. So when people said things were okay, they weren’t lying. They were innocent.”

  Chiarelli, in a 2008 interview, disputed Othman’s assertion. In fact, he said, he had gone to Maliki in July “to tell him how bad it was.” The prime minister’s chilling response, he recalled, had been “It was a lot worse in Saddam’s time.” American officers interpreted this to mean that Maliki didn’t intend to do anything to curtail the violence, which was Shiite payback against Sunnis for what had happened before.

  Meanwhile, political pressure was building for a radical shift away from Casey’s approach. In September the Iraq Study Group, which had been appointed by Congress to review policy in the war and to make recommendations to improve it, arrived in Baghdad to check its views against the thinking in the Green Zone, the heavily guarded enclave in the center of Baghdad that housed the headquarters of the American effort in Iraq. Many of the study group’s members, such as former congressman Lee Hamilton and former secretary of state James Baker—its two chairs—were more familiar with politics and diplomacy than warfare. Another member, Robert Gates, was destined to become defense secretary just four months later, but nobody knew that then. At the time, there were just two members of the group who knew the military establishment well: former defense secretary William Perry and former senator Charles Robb, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War and a longtime member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both Perry and Robb had come to think that current U.S. strategy couldn’t continue and were mulling advocating a troop escalation.

  Before heading to Baghdad, Perry had distributed a memorandum to the group making an argument for such a “surge” in troops in Iraq. “We thought we couldn’t get enough troops to surge the whole country, but we could maybe have an effect in Baghdad,” he recalled. (President Bush said in 2008 that when he interviewed Robert Gates in November 2006 about becoming defense secretary, Gates told him that he also had favored such an increase.)

  When the group met with Casey and Ch
iarelli, the generals threw cold water on the idea of a troop increase. “They were very explicit,” Perry said. “Both Casey and Chiarelli said this would not be useful, as they saw the problems in Iraq.” The officers offered three arguments: First, it would give the Iraqi government the impression that the Americans would solve their problems. Second, it would decrease the leverage the Americans had. Third, whatever improvement it provided wouldn’t last. “They made the point that wherever you put American troops, it would stabilize the situation—but when they left, it would destabilize the situation.”

  Perry worried that the group was being given what he called a “party line,” so he asked for separate one-on-one meetings to get the generals’ personal views. In those private sessions, he said, “Both stuck to their guns.”

  Faced with the opposition of the top U.S. military leadership on the ground, Perry withdrew the idea. When he wrote the first draft of the military section of the group’s report, he left out the idea of a surge. “It would have been in there if they had responded differently,” he said. Ultimately, the group’s report straddled the idea, rejecting a major increase but conditionally supporting “a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad . . . if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective.”

  Chiarelli said later that he wasn’t against getting additional forces. “In fact, I already knew where I would put a brigade,” he said in an interview at the Pentagon in 2008 shortly before he pinned on a fourth star and became the vice chief of staff of the Army. But, he added, he knew that it would take time to bring in additional troops. “I thought we could push violence down a lot faster if we went to Maliki” and delivered a strong message: Your policies, such as not delivering services to Sunnis, are exacerbating sectarian tensions. “We need to use our leverage with Maliki,” was his recommendation. At any rate, he remembered, when he arrived in Iraq at the beginning of 2006, he had been told that during that year, the U.S. combat presence would be nearly halved, from 108 bases to 50, and from 15 brigades to as few as 8.

  In sum, Casey and Chiarelli were sticking to their approach, even though there was little evidence of it working. The U.S. strategy, concluded Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was “deeply flawed in timing and resources. It was based on a grossly exaggerated estimate of political success, an almost deliberately false exaggeration of the success of the economic aid effort and progress in developing the ISF.”

  Francis “Bing” West, a former Marine and Pentagon official who had a son fighting in Iraq, put it even more bluntly: “The strategy was a hope posing as a plan.”

  By late 2006, agreed Philip Zelikow, who at the time was counselor at the State Department, there was essentially “a strategic void” in Iraq.

  Oddly, the White House also decided that this was a good time to attack critics of the war as appeasers and worse. Rumsfeld said they were morally and intellectually confused, not unlike those who had opposed confronting Hitler in the late 1930s. Cheney said those who disagreed with his administration’s approach were abetting terrorists. Bush, a mite more generously, conceded that the detractors were “sincere” and “patriotic,” but said “they could . . . not be more wrong.”

  That White House move was an inept political tactic, because it made it appear that the president was divorced from the realities of Iraq and dismissing the legitimate worries of those who believed—with ample evidence—that the war was being mishandled and that it, in fact, was rapidly spinning out of control. During the winter of 2005-6, there had been about 500 attacks a week on U.S. and allied forces. By late in the summer of 2006, there were almost 800. Some 1,200 roadside bombs were detonated in August. The number of roadside bombs was at an “all time high,” conceded Maj. Gen. William Caldwell IV, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. The bombings continued like a daily drumbeat, contributing to the capital’s monthly civilian death toll of about 1,000.

  In one of the most horrific incidents, on September 23, a bomb exploded as people waited in line to buy gasoline, sending women engulfed in flames running through the streets. Witnesses reported that two young girls embraced each other as they stood in the inferno burning to death. “This deployment, every patrol you’re finding dead people,” Staff Sgt. Ian Newland told Army Times. “It’s like one to 12 a patrol. Their eyes are gouged out. Their arms are broken. We saw a kid who had been shot 10 to 15 times.” Newland’s company arrived in Baghdad in August, and over the next 15 months it would lose 14 men, the most of any Army company to fight in Iraq. In the first week of October 2006, some 24 soldiers and Marines were killed, most of them in Baghdad, and nearly 300 more were wounded. The violence was also spreading, with Shiite militias fighting Iraqi police to the south of the capital and confronting Sunni militias to the north.

  Internal Army surveys of the morale of soldiers underscored the feeling of loss. In both 2004 and 2005, studies by an official Mental Health Advisory Team had reported that morale was improving among troops involved in combat. But a September 2006 assessment found a sharp decline.

  On October 19, Gen. Caldwell, the U.S. military spokesman, acknowledged that the renewed security effort in the capital was failing. “Operation Together Forward has made a difference in the focus areas, but has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence,” Caldwell said. “We find the insurgent elements, the extremists, are in fact punching back hard. They’re trying to get back into those areas. We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”

  Caldwell’s admission might have been the worst point of the entire war, at least so far. The U.S. military had played its ace in the hole—“the sole superpower” had asserted itself in Iraq’s most important city—yet had not been able to reverse the deteriorating security of the capital. What’s more, not only had U.S. commanders taken their best shot and failed, they apparently were going to continue on the same unpromising course of handing off control to Iraqis who didn’t seem competent or much interested in the stability the Americans wanted.

  In the midst of all this, in the fall of 2006, Iraqi army and police forces finally hit their targeted size of about 325,000 total—but the U.S. wasn’t able to stand down as they stood up, as the president for years had said would happen, repeating the phrase as late as June of the year. Paradoxically, as the number of Iraqi soldiers and police grew, so did the violence in the streets of the capital. From August through October 2006, the number of attacks in Iraq grew by 22 percent, according to the U.S. military database, which almost certainly undercounted the total but probably was accurate in tracking the direction of the trend.

  The Americans seemed to have run out of both troops and ideas. The one possible bright spot in that bankrupt approach was that it created the conditions for the strategic surprise that Petraeus and Odierno would launch a few months later, as they showed both new flexibility and determination. Given the track record of the previous four years, no one in Iraq saw that one coming.

  The downward trend continued. In October 2006 an American soldier was kidnapped. American intelligence officials suspected he was being held in Sadr City, the stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia, the Jaysh al-Mahdi, or JAM. The U.S. Army, searching desperately for the missing soldier, erected a series of checkpoints along the Canal Road, the broad boulevard that parallels the south side of a densely packed neighborhood slum. Maliki told Casey to lift the checkpoints. “If that’s your order, we’ll do it,” Casey responded. “But people will say you don’t care about American soldiers, and that you kowtowed to Sadr. Third, the Sunnis will read this as a pro-JAM action. Can you accept that?” Maliki said he could.

  Casey was reading a history of the Vietnam War at the time and thought of the weak and chaotic governments that American officials had dealt with in Saigon back then. “How do you save a head of state when he is diametrically opposed to the policy you are trying to save him wi
th?” he thought to himself.

  Then he called his deputy, Chiarelli, and told him to lift the checkpoints. “This was going on all the time with Maliki,” Chiarelli recalled. “We had certain things we could do in Sadr City, but not what we needed to do.”

  Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, hearing about the order to remove the checkpoints, called another general and said, “This is the singular moment of defeat. If you want to know when we lost, this was it.” The ethnic cleansing continued as Shiite militias pushed Sunnis westward. “You’d find dumped bodies every day,” recalled Maj. David Voorhies, who was advising an Iraqi army unit that he believed was infiltrated by Shiite militias. “You’d see murders, a lot of extra-judicial killings, a lot of kidnappings, a lot of demonstrations would arise. Eventually those areas would collapse . . . on Amiriyah and Gaziliyah, which were really the last two big Sunni neighborhoods in west Baghdad.”

  The failures of the summer and fall of 2006 may have given the U.S. military establishment the push it needed to realize that everything it had tried over several years wasn’t working, and that—despite the assurances of commanders in Iraq—a very different approach was needed. A major split was developing inside the military about what the next step in Iraq should be. Some called for an accelerated transition to Iraqi control, but others said that would just lead to an intensified civil war. Others called for backing out of Iraq and letting the Iraqis sort it out, and others responded that that move could lead to regional war. And a few, here and there, were thinking about increasing the number of troops and using them differently. One of the significant consequences of this split was that, really for the first time in the war, the Bush administration could no longer blandly state that it was following the advice of the military. By late 2006, there simply no longer was a consensus view to follow. “We may need more resources, but first we need a strategy,” Eliot Cohen and Francis “Bing” West would write a few months later.