“That’s impossible—you’re not going home,” the doctor said.
“Can I demonstrate to you the degree of my recovery?” asked Petraeus.
The doctor asked what he meant. “Just undo my tubes here,” Petraeus said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything to hurt myself, just undo my tubes.” He got down on the floor and counted out 50 push-ups for the doctor, who then allowed him to leave the hospital.
The life of a light infantryman is tough for soldiers in their twenties, requiring both strength and stamina. The weight, the rain, the stress, can combine to break the health of soldiers in their thirties. Petraeus left the hospital worried about regaining his strength. “What was really eating at me at the time was how well I was going to be able to run again,” he recalled. He went to the base gym to work out on a stationary bicycle, “gently, just to keep the legs moving.” But there was a running track just outside the gym. And the watch on his wrist had a stopwatch function. “One thing led to another,” he said a bit sheepishly, explaining how he happened to find himself jogging on the track, trying to see if he could still breathe deeply. “It wasn’t the gunshot wound alone, I had thoracic surgery where they cut you, I have a scar that goes from here all the way around to there,” he said, tracing a line from his chest, under his arm, and to his back. “There is a lot of scarring so the lung doesn’t glide in your chest the way it used to, so it feels like you are permanently taped up. I just wanted to get a sense of what it was going to feel like.” The next round of X-rays revealed that that spontaneous bout of exercise had begun to fill the injured lung with fluid. The doctors told him to knock off running.
KEANE ON THE WARPATH
On September 19, 2006, Keane was ready to make his case to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The two old bulls had had some differences in the past, but Keane felt there was mutual respect. “We could talk to each other,” he said.
Gen. Pace showed up at the meeting, a bit to Keane’s surprise, because Pace’s reputation was that he was taking a hands-off approach to Iraq, on the grounds that his plate was full with the rest of the world and that two other four-star generals, Abizaid and Casey, were on the case. Keane worried that Rumsfeld would play to Pace, as was his wont. But the chairman remained quiet, just taking notes, and Rumsfeld stayed focused on Keane’s grim message. “We are edging toward strategic failure,” Keane warned the defense secretary. “Despite capturing Saddam Hussein, killing his two sons, holding three elections, writing a constitution, installing a permanent government, beginning to develop a capable ISF, killing Zarqawi—the level of violence has increased every year in the contested areas. Security and stability is worse today than it has been since the insurgency started. It threatens the survival of the government and the success of our mission.”
So, Keane asked rhetorically, what is wrong with our strategy? His answer: “It is not designed to defeat the insurgency and therefore the insurgency thrives, and the violence is growing. It begs the question, how can you defeat it?”
Continuing to borrow Rumsfeld’s approach, he posed another question and then answered it: “How can we possibly obtain victory out of all that is happening?” First, Keane said, “you have to admit that you cannot defeat the insurgency by destroying their forces or simply transitioning to Iraqi security forces. You have to come to grips with that.” Next, he said, start employing classic counter-insurgency practice: “The only way to do this is the way that it’s been done in the past, using proven COIN [counterinsurgency] practices—and that is by protecting the people and permanently isolating the insurgents from the population.” So, he told Rumsfeld, the U.S. Army needed to stop conducting mindless Humvee patrols out of big bases and instead start living among the people and patrolling small areas on foot. Set up traffic-control points, conduct a census, and issue identity cards—all classic measures to channel and track the movements of a population. His most controversial recommendation was that Rumsfeld order everyone to stop talking about drawing down troop levels in Iraq. Get some new generals in there, hold them accountable, and match your policies to your resources. To live among the people, and dry up the sea in which the insurgents swam, you are going to need more troops. And focus them on Baghdad. What Keane was saying was hardly novel. He had captured the core lesson of David Galula, the great French theorist of counterinsurgency, who argued in his influential Counterinsurgency: Theory and Practice that to defeat an insurgency, military units must live among the population. Indeed, Keane recommended that book to Rumsfeld. The defense secretary was “uncomfortable” during the meeting and opposed increasing the troop levels without offering a reasoning, Keane said as he read aloud from his extensive notes of the meeting.
GRADING THE CHAIRMAN
Pace followed up by asking Keane to come see him. Two days later, Pace began that meeting by asking Keane with a smile what grade he would give him as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“F,” Keane replied. He wasn’t smiling.
Gen. Pace was taken aback. People didn’t usually talk to a top officer in the U.S. military that way, not even retired four-star generals. What do you mean? he asked.
“Well, Pete, the number one national security priority we have is Iraq, and it’s the number one priority in the Pentagon,” Keane told him. But, he added, “you’re absorbed in so many other things.” And, he continued, why the hell are you, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking a retired general about the situation in Iraq? How is it possible that you, with all the far-flung resources of the global U.S. military establishment at your fingertips, know less about the war than one guy who goes out there and asks a few questions? “You’ve got to get into this full time,” Keane admonished. (One of Pace’s subordinates would later recall that at about the same time, Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chief of the Navy, sent a similar message, to the effect, “This is going down on your watch. You need to do something.”)
Keane also told Pace to put new people in charge: Replace Abizaid at Central Command with Fox Fallon, who as an experienced regional commander could step into the job quickly, Keane said. And replace Casey with Dave Petraeus.
Pace responded with alacrity, Keane recalled, canceling a planned trip to South America and instead starting up a group of officers to review Iraq policy. This new panel, dubbed “the council of colonels,” was tasked first to look at the entire war on terror, but then decided that the first question had to be whether the strategy of the Iraq war was working. It first met on September 27, not long after Keane rang Pace’s bell. It began asking a series of questions that in the following weeks would make Pace and the Joint Staff reexamine the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
In November, Raymond Odierno, another Keane protégé, headed out to Iraq to take over the number two position in the war from Lt. Gen. Pete Chiarelli. On November 20, a macabre note was struck when a leading Iraqi comedian was assassinated. It wasn’t clear what the point of the killing was, because Walid Hassan had specialized in mocking the difficulties of life in occupied Iraq in a non-sectarian fashion. Three days later, a barrage of car bombs, mortars, and missiles hit Sadr City, killing more than 200 people. It was the single deadliest attack in years. The next day, Shiite fighters retaliated with a citywide attack on Sunni mosques crowded for Friday prayers. Bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and automatic-weapons fire hit crowds of worshippers.
As he did Petraeus, Keane knew Odierno well. (It is an interesting coincidence that all three men are from the greater New York area, which generally isn’t seen in American culture as a hotbed of generalship. Keane is from Manhattan; Petraeus from Cornwall, just up the Hudson; and Odierno from just across that river, in northern New Jersey.) In the summer of 2001, Keane, then the vice chief of staff of the Army, had gone to a meeting with Rumsfeld at which 40 slides were presented on various recommendations the defense secretary had planned to make. This was before the 9/11 attacks, and long before there was any serious thought of invading Iraq. Tucked among the slides, to Keane’s surprise,
was a plan to reduce the active-duty Army to eight divisions from ten, and on top of that to cut four divisions from the National Guard. This represented a major reduction in the ground combat strength of the United States, and Keane, the number two officer in the Army, had received no advance notice that it was coming. He was stunned—that just wasn’t how a superpower was supposed to work. “Mister Secretary, I disagree with this strongly,” Keane had said. He asked for 24 hours to develop a response. Back in his office, he summoned Odierno, then a bright young one-star general on his staff, and told him to brief Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz on how the Army had arrived at its current force structure and how that related to the size of the Army that actually fights. He picked Odierno, he said, in part because “he had this intellect, this grasp, this power of persuasion.” Also, he said, “a lot of guys become afraid to fail. You want them to push the envelope, and Odierno was doing that.”
The next day, Odierno gave a presentation to Wolfowitz and others on why the Army’s numbers shouldn’t be cut. At the end of the briefing, Wolfowitz, who had been given the lead on the issue by Rumsfeld, said, “I’m convinced.” He said he would take the recommendation to the secretary, who concurred.
Even so, Keane wasn’t entirely approving of Odierno. He had some issues with how he had led the 4th Infantry Division in 2003-4, during his first tour in Iraq. Nevertheless, Keane thought Odierno was a tough, intelligent officer who, unlike some of his peers, was willing to take risks for what he thought was right.
KEANE AND ODIERNO VS. THE WORLD
Between Keane and Odierno, a kind of guerrilla campaign was launched inside the U.S. military establishment. Keane was in Washington and Odierno was in Baghdad, but they talked by telephone almost every day.
“We don’t easily jump the chain of command,” retired Col. John Martin, a friend and adviser to Petraeus, said in another context. Making one of the most audacious moves of the entire war, Odierno did exactly that, bypassing two levels of command above him to talk to officials at the White House and aides to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was about to become the sole senior official in the active-duty military speaking out for an increase in troops, recalled a senior U.S. intelligence officer who privately supported such a full, five-brigade counteroffensive. “He was the only one in the chain of command—not MNF-I, not Central Command, not the Joint Staff,” this intelligence official recalled. (Adm. Mike Mullen, who was then the chief of the Navy and in 2007 would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would later insist that he had supported the surge, but apparently meant that he had endorsed the smaller, two-brigade option that Pace would take to President Bush just after Christmas 2006.)
“Odierno and I are having a continuous dialogue” at this time, Keane recalled. “He knows he needs more troops, he knows the strategy has got to change. His problem is General Casey.”
Just as Odierno was beginning his epic end run around Casey and the rest of the senior leaders of the U.S. military establishment, the president asserted in an interview with the Washington Post, “It’s important to trust the judgment of the military when they’re making military plans. . . . I’m a strict adherer to the command structure.”
Ironically, it was only after Odierno stepped outside that structure, rejecting the views of his superiors and lobbying the White House on his own, that policy formulation began to work effectively, producing a workable strategy. Arguably, his actions amounted to insubordination. Casey seemed puzzled when told in a 2008 inverview that Odierno had grave doubts about the direction of the war back in December 2006. “Ray never came to me and said, ‘Look, I think you’ve got to do something fundamentally different here,’” Casey said.
“Courage takes two forms in war,” observed Hew Strachan, the British military historian and interpreter of Clausewitz. “Courage in the face of personal danger, whose effects are felt in the tactical sphere, and the courage to take responsibility, a requirement of strategic success.” By taking on his new boss, Odierno displayed that second, more elusive form of bravery. He was laying his career on the line. If the surge went wrong, he would be the first blamed by many inside the military who had made clear their profound concerns and objections.
Lined up against Odierno were the collective powers at the top of the U.S. military. Abizaid, the chief of the Central Command, told Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on November 15 that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more troops to Iraq. “I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem,” Abizaid emphasized. “I believe that troop levels need to stay where they are now.”
Gen. Chiarelli, who was about to leave Iraq, was also questioning a troop escalation. He said at the time, “I happen to believe we have done everything militarily we possibly can.” Asked about that in 2008, he said his concern had been “How are we going to source them? And I still thought, troops alone are not going to stop this problem, that we need to get the Iraqi government to act differently.”
In early December, Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn’t see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren’t doing. He agreed with the other members of the Joint Chiefs: What was needed, he griped, wasn’t a troop surge, but a new commitment by the rest of the U.S. government. In this view, the military was doing its part but had been left high and dry by the civilians. Like the rest of the Joint Chiefs, Pace believed there was no military answer to the situation in Iraq. “In the military sense, you’d only commit the reserves if you were exploiting success or salvaging failure,” said one general involved in the discussions, explaining that he didn’t seen anything happening from a relatively small troop increase. “It isn’t that we’re opposed to doing it, it’s just that we don’t see the payoff.” This was a rational calculation, because at the time no one could predict that the Sunni insurgency would largely come over to the American side, or at least to the American payroll, or that Moqtada al-Sadr would order his Shiite militia to stand down.
Even Colin Powell, who though retired from active duty for more than a decade remained the best known military figure in the country, spoke out against the notion. Gen. Casey already had tried a surge in Baghdad in the summer of 2006, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued in a December appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. So, Powell said, “I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purpose of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work.” At any rate, he added, “There really are no additional troops.”
By mid-December, the notion of some sort of troop escalation, or “surge,” was a major topic of conversation in both Washington and Baghdad. Yet Maliki’s government seemed lukewarm at best on the idea. After Gates met with Iraqi officials in a house in the Green Zone at this time, I buttonholed Abdul Qadir Muhammed Jassim, the Iraqi defense minister, as he was leaving and asked him in the driveway if he had told the Americans that he supported the surge. Somewhat inscrutably, he responded, “I didn’t say no.” Maliki was said to favor a “donut” approach—that is, put more U.S. troops outside the capital and leave the city to him, perhaps so the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in several Baghdad neighborhoods could be finished. “I think they wanted to present us with a fait accompli of a Shiia Baghdad,” Kilcullen suspected.
One of the very few voices in American public life supporting an increase in troops was that of Senator John McCain, who was in the difficult position of arguing that the war had been poorly executed but that more troops would improve the situation. “Without additional combat forces, we will not win this war,” he said in mid-November.
On the morning of Thursday, December 7, President Bush sparred with reporters over Iraq. One asked if he were in denial about the state of the war. “It’s bad in Iraq,” he replied with a glare. “Does that help?”
Actually, it may have. Finally, and years later than he should have, the pres
ident was beginning to grapple with the ugly facts on the ground in Iraq.
ONE WEEKEND AT AEI CHANGES THE WAR
The 2003 invasion of Iraq arguably was conceived at the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank that is the mecca of American neoconservativism. Its boxy building across from the National Geographic Society’s headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., was the roost of a variety of prominent hawks—Fred Kagan, Richard Perle, Gary Schmitt, Tom Donnelly, William Kristol. In the fall of 2006, they saw their war going down the tubes. The same building also houses the Weekly Standard, the torchbearer publication of neoconservativism, and the Project for the New American Century, an advocacy group for an aggressive interventionist foreign policy that was an early and persistent advocate of ousting Saddam Hussein.
For years, the American right had been far more conflicted over the war than liberals generally perceive. Kagan, who had met with Bush at Camp David in June, long had thought that the war was mishandled. He was especially wary of Rumsfeld, who he thought was overly absorbed with restricting troop numbers in Iraq and insufficiently focused on providing the troops and other resources needed to prevail. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, Kagan and others called for the defense secretary to step down—an action that he believed had made him persona non grata at the Pentagon. Like Keane, he had grown increasingly concerned during the course of 2006, especially after a new Iraqi government was seated and violence increased rather than tapered off, as the Bush administration had predicted.
Bob Woodward’s thorough but White House-centric The War Within reports that the president was settling on a surge by November 2006. There is little on the public record to support that assertion. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that Bush’s meeting with outside experts early in December had a strong effect on his thinking.
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