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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  At the same time that Haditha was occurring, an analysis done for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, its internal think tank, concluded that the war was going badly and, in fact, was in far more dire a state than the Bush administration understood. “The costs of failure are likely to be high,” it somberly warned, “much higher than was incurred following the U.S. withdrawal from Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon or even Vietnam.”

  The White House was in denial about the trend of the war. Officials around President Bush believed the problem wasn’t their strategy in Iraq but a failure to adequately explain that approach. The view, said Peter Feaver, was “We’ve got the right strategy, but we’re losing the public debate, because people don’t understand our strategy.” They certainly were losing the public, not entirely because of the slow downward spiral in Iraq. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August 2005, and the Bush administration’s plodding response to the catastrophic storm raised new doubts about its competence and its grasp of events on the ground. Critics of the Iraq war long had charged that the administration’s handling of the war combined overoptimism with ineptitude. Now Americans were seeing that mix far closer to home. In both situations, it looked like either the U.S. government didn’t care or couldn’t perform. It wasn’t clear which was worse.

  So, to better inform the public, in November 2005—less than two weeks after the Haditha incident, as it happened—the White House issued a white paper titled “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” In discussing it, President Bush emphasized the transition to Iraqi forces. “As Iraqi forces increasingly take the lead in the fight against the terrorists, they’re also taking control of more and more Iraqi territory,” he said in a speech in Annapolis, Maryland. “Our coalition has handed over roughly ninety square miles of Baghdad Province to Iraqi security forces. Iraqi battalions have taken over responsibility for areas in South-Central Iraq, sectors of Southeast Iraq, sectors of Western Iraq and sectors of North-Central Iraq. As Iraqi forces take responsibility for more of their own territory, coalition forces can concentrate on training Iraqis and hunting down high-value targets.” He repeated his promise that “as the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down.”

  When those Iraqi forces came on line, he vowed, “We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.” In fact, the U.S. military would decide a year later to pursue almost the opposite course: It would move into cities, establish scores of small outposts, and patrol almost incessantly, having learned that if you are present in a neighborhood for only two hours a day, the insurgents may well control it for the other twenty-two.

  Despite the document’s title, the Bush administration really hadn’t carried out a serious strategic review that asked the basic questions: What are we trying to do—that is, what are our key goals? How are we trying to do it—that is, what course of action will we pursue? Does that course promise to achieve those goals? What sort of resources—people, time, money—are likely to be required to reach those goals? One hallmark of such a review would be to seek out dissenting views, probing differences inside the administration, especially those between civilian and military officials.

  But the Bush administration’s tendency was to suppress dissent and paper over differences, substituting loyalty for analysis, so the war continued to stand on a strategic foundation of sand. Nor had the president been well served by his generals, who with a few exceptions didn’t seem to pose the necessary questions. “Strategy is about choices,” said one of those exceptions, Maj. Gen. David Fastabend. Yet he lamented, one day in Baghdad two years later, “We don’t teach it, we don’t recognize it. The Army doesn’t understand the difference between plans and strategy. When you ask specifically for strategy, you get aspirations.”

  Such incompetence can be dangerous. As Eliot Cohen, an academic who would surface repeatedly in the Iraq war as an influential behind-the-scenes figure, commented later in a different context, “Haziness about ends and means, about what to do and how to do it, is a mark of strategic ineptitude; in war it gets people killed.”

  By late 2005, none of the basic assumptions on which the Iraq war had been launched had been borne out, noted a senior Pentagon official as he reviewed its course years later. “If you look at the premises behind the war, they were: It will be quick, it will be easy, it will be cheap, it will be catalytic.” That failure in turn led many Americans simply to advocate leaving Iraq because they saw chaos as the inevitable outcome of any course of action. “The only reason we are there now is because of the Petraeus surge, which shifted the balance so that reasonable people could say there might be a better alternative than chaos.” In a Middle Eastern restaurant a few minutes’ walk south of the Pentagon, the official sipped his beer. “Now, the fundamental fact about Iraq is, we’re kind of stuck.”

  Strikingly, some of the people who would become involved in revamping the American approach to the war had disagreed with the rationale for the American invasion in the first place. Many more, probably a large majority of those who would remake the war, faulted the way the occupation had been handled. It seems that having such critical views was almost a prerequisite to grasping how to build a new foundation for the war.

  GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS

  The answer for what to do in Iraq would come largely through one person, Gen. David Petraeus, who over the next year would lead the way in determining how to revamp the U.S. approach to the war.

  There were many experts as familiar with the tenets of counterinsurgency as Petraeus was. But he also knew how to get the Army to heed that knowledge. That is, his vision of how to change the war would become a restatement of classic counterinsurgency theory, which holds that the people are the objective, so the task is to figure out how to “win” them. This was familiar stuff to military intellectuals. In the fall of 2005, even as Petraeus was heading to his assignment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he would craft the new Army doctrine, Andrew Krepinevich, a prominent defense expert, published an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine that summarized the needed approach:

  ... the United States needs a real strategy built around the principles of counterinsurgency warfare. To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents. . . . Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an “oil-spot” strategy in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people.

  Some 37 years earlier, Henry Kissinger, just before becoming President Nix-on’s national security adviser, had written in the same magazine a critique of the conduct of the Vietnam War: “To be effective, the so-called pacification program had to meet two conditions: (a) it had to provide security for the population; (b) it had to establish a political and institutional link between the villages and Saigon. Neither condition was ever met.” In Iraq in 2005, the U.S. military faced a remarkably similar problem, on both counts.

  As Kissinger noted, to carry out such a mission, it was necessary to put more U.S. troops into the fight. This was a point that some retired generals had been making about the Iraq war for some time. Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who had left the military in 2002 over his concerns about the looming war, had told the Senate Armed Services Committee early in 2005 that he supported sending “additional forces . . . rather than sustain this level of effort for five more years of bleeding.”

  The hard part for Petraeus would be to impose his vision on the U.S. Army, one of the largest and most tradition-bound organizations in the country. Casey had tried and largely failed—but he at least had recognized that it needed a new direction. It appears that as long as Donald Rumsfeld was defense secretary, it would have been difficult to reorient the U.S. effort in Iraq. For all his talk of transforming the military, Rumsfeld appeared chary of making changes where they were most needed, in the war that was
under way. Rather, his main interest in Iraq appeared to be in fending off critics. Everyone makes mistakes; Rumsfeld’s tragic flaw was his inability to change course after making them.

  For example, soon after Krepinevich’s article appeared in Foreign Affairs, Rumsfeld sent a memo to subordinates saying he was hearing a lot about it and asking someone to see the author. Krepinevich, summoned to a breakfast meeting at the Pentagon, thought he was going there to provide some advice. Instead, he recalled, he was berated by Lawrence Di Rita, a Rumsfeld aide and at one point the Pentagon spokesman, who told him that he didn’t understand the war. “Andy, you’re misguided,” Di Rita said to him. “That’s what we’re already doing over there.”

  While on active duty in the Army, Krepinevich, had earned a Ph.D. at Harvard for a courageous dissertation arguing that the Army, rather than the politicians or the media, had lost the Vietnam War. Some of his peers thought that the thesis had curtailed his Army career. He held his ground with Rumsfeld’s aides. “I disagree,” he responded. “When I ask for the campaign plan, the guys in J-5 [the planning office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff] give me a book of metrics”—that is, how the effort was being measured, such as the amount of money spent or the electricity produced. “If you can’t explain your campaign plan, you probably don’t have one.”

  Vice Adm. James Stavridis, a military assistant to Rumsfeld who also was at the meeting, said that Krepinevich should get out to Iraq to see for himself how well things were going. Krepinevich said he’d like to do so. At that point, Di Rita crudely joked that, yes, Krepinevich should be flown there and abandoned on the road into Baghdad from its airport, perhaps the most dangerous six miles then in the world. Hearing that unfunny threat, Krepinevich lost interest in the conversation. “After that, in terms of my active involvement—well, I gave it my best shot in the article,” he recalled, turning his hands upward. (Throughout this book, accounts of conversations are based on the recollection of at least one participant, and often more than one. In this case, all three who were present contributed. Di Rita, for his part, said his recollection of the meeting was “admittedly hazy” but insisted that it was “bullshit” that he had made the joke about sending Krepinevich to the airport road. He said that he likely was referring to the fact that the road had become safer during that period. Krepinevich responded, “He does not remember such a conversation. I do, vividly.”)

  FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS, is more than 7,000 miles from Haditha, Iraq, but like that Iraqi village, it overlooks a major river that has helped define its nation. The installation sits atop a high bluff where the Missouri, having driven nearly straight west from St. Louis to Kansas City, begins its giant swing to the northwest that carries it across the Great Plains and into the Rockies. In the nineteenth century, the wide Missouri was the river of the frontier, the pathway first for the expedition led by two Army officers, Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark, and later for steamboats supplying Army units almost all the way up to Custer’s last battlefield at Little Big Horn, Montana. Leavenworth also became a jumping-off point for the dragoons of the Army of the West, sending expeditions across the plains against the Apache, the Modoc, the Cheyenne, the Ute, the Nez Perce, the Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Kickapoo.

  Under Petraeus’s command, Leavenworth would become the starting point for a new approach in the war that would involve making peace with the tribes of Iraq. In October 2005, a month after finishing his second tour of duty in Iraq, Petraeus drove halfway across the United States to his new post at Leavenworth, where he would oversee much of the Army’s training and educational establishment. He knew he would be focusing on counterinsurgency issues and would need to produce a new Army manual on the subject. Driving alone in his 2001 BMW 325i, he listened repeatedly to a series of compact discs of an exit interview done by Army historians with his predecessor, Gen. William Wallace. In mid-October, Petraeus parked at the commanding general’s house at Fort Leavenworth, at the top of a grassy slope that still bears ruts carved by the wagon wheels of the Santa Fe Trail as it emerges from the river crossing.

  At the time, some insiders thought that sending Petraeus to the plains of Kansas was the wrong move for a nation fighting two wars in the Middle East. “I was opposed to the assignment,” said his old mentor from the 101st Airborne, retired Gen. Jack Keane. “I thought, bring him to Washington, get him close to the policy makers.” Keane thought the ideal slot would be the J-3—that is, the director of operations for the Joint Staff, where his protégé could oversee and coordinate the global activities of the U.S. military, and, he said, “inform a reluctant senior leadership.” Petraeus did not particularly want the Leavenworth job. He would later tell two Army historians in his own exit interview, “I have to tell you candidly, when I was told I was going to be the CAC [Combined Arms Center] commander, I thought, ‘What do you do out there? Harass the students in CGSC [Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff College] that day? What is this all about?’ ”

  Petraeus found plenty to do. The first thing he did was convene a group of Army officers to consider whether the Army training establishment was doing all it could to prepare leaders and units for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, on November 16, three days before the Haditha incident, Petraeus called Conrad Crane, an Army historian, and asked him to lead a team that would write a new manual on counterinsurgency for the Army and the Marine Corps. Eliot Cohen, a professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins University, had suggested Crane to Petraeus as a smart military expert who understood the subject and could lead a team. The perpetually bow-tied Cohen is an unusual figure in Washington, influential in several circles, with an extraordinary range of contacts inside the government, from the White House to the Congress to the military and intelligence establishments, a network created mainly because those institutions send many of the best young people to him to study strategy. He makes that study both intense and concrete, suggesting thousands of pages in readings, from Sun Tzu to Winston Churchill, but also leading his students on walks of battlefields, from Gettysburg to Italy to the Middle East, to mull campaign strategies. Cohen also was comfortable talking to journalists covering national security and foreign policy, especially if they were willing to follow up on his patient efforts to educate them. If being a Harvard-trained Jewish academic didn’t make him an outsider in military eyes, his resolute dislike of spectator sports would have—despite being from the Boston area, he followed neither baseball nor football. This actually may have aided his strategic analyses, as the sports metaphors that tend to pass for strategic discourse in the American military—“we’re five yards from the end zone,” or “it’s the fourth quarter and we’re down fifty”—sailed by him. He also was the author of Supreme Command, an influential study of how civilian leaders have intervened in wartime to oversee strategy and steer their wars toward success. Before the invasion of Iraq, the White House made it known that President Bush had studied the book. But for all that, Cohen didn’t know that David Petraeus and Conrad Crane had been friends for decades, since they sat next to each other in a West Point military history class.

  Crane had gone on to a career in the Army during which he earned a doctorate in history at Stanford. After retiring he became a professor at the Army War College, where he was coauthor of a study that before the American invasion of Iraq highlighted the difficulties of occupying that country. “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious,” the study warned. “Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.” That is, of course, exactly what top Bush administration officials did, in part because many believed U.S. forces would leave Iraq quickly and so there would be no occupation.

  DAVID LLOYD GEORGE, the British prime minister for much of World War I, observed after that conflict that for officers in the British army, “to be a good average is safer than to be gifted above your fellows.” This also tends to be true in the U.S. Army. Given that conformist inclination, the mos
t surprising fact about Gen. Petraeus may be that he is a general at all.

  In an Army of generals who tend to be competent company men, Petraeus is “an outlier,” said Col. Peter Mansoor, who came to know him well, first in working with him on counterinsurgency doctrine at Fort Leavenworth in 2006 and then the following year as his executive officer in Iraq. “General Petraeus doesn’t seem to fit the mold, because he is extremely bright, and intellectual,” said Mansoor, who, like Petraeus, holds a doctorate—in his case, in military history from Ohio State University, home of a top department in the United States for that subject. “But he is a PT [physical training, or exercise] stud, and tactically and technically competent, and that matters to Army [promotion] boards.”

  Petraeus was an unusual figure in the Army. He was indeed a physical fitness freak, whose inclination was to run five to eight miles a day and then work out for another 45 minutes—despite having a pelvis that was smashed parachuting and a damaged lung from being shot through the chest. His physical drive was hugely in his favor, in terms of Army culture, and may have been the thing that redeemed him with his peers. He is thought to be the only officer ever to come in first in both his class at Army Ranger School and at the Army’s Command and General Staff College.