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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  It wasn’t quite put to Bush in such blunt terms at the Pentagon meeting, but the council of colonels had concluded that the United States had invaded Iraq on the basis of a series of flawed assumptions—that Bush and others wrongly assumed that it would be a war of liberation, that Iraqis would take over power quickly, and that the country would remain more or less orderly, with a functioning police force. Likewise, the Bush administration was operating on some assumptions that badly needed to be examined. Can the Iraqi government survive? Is it under the control of Iran? Does it have staying power? Are Iraqi Security Forces truly a national institution? Will they crack if the civil war spreads and deepens? Will neighboring powers, especially Iran, become more involved in Iraq? And, most important of all, are we past the point of no return? If so, how do we reposition ourselves to minimize the damage? If not, what do we do next? Does anybody in Iraq believe we will stick around? The point was that until these questions were thought through, the United States wouldn’t have a strategy; it would have only aspirations.

  Those sharp questions weren’t put to Bush, but the group’s findings were. Even those conclusions were a sharp departure from Bush administration policy. Iraq was indeed in a “low-grade” civil war, the colonels said, and on the path to a bigger one. “We are losing because we are not winning and time is not on our side,” they flatly stated, according to the document summarizing their work. Their warning that Iraq was experiencing “an intensifying civil war” was a finding that both the Pentagon and the White House had long resisted. (The slide containing these key findings on the Iraq war appears in this book’s photo insert.)

  The colonels also pointed to a basic problem with the approach then in place: “Current . . . troop strength was inadequate to secure the population (cannot execute ‘clear, hold and build’).” In other words, the Americans were trying to implement a strategy for which they hadn’t devoted enough people. The point of that finding, recalled Greenwood, the Marine colonel who was a member of the council, was that, “unless troop levels were increased dramatically, the U.S. strategy would remain bankrupt.”

  The report amounted to a blinking red light for the U.S. effort in Iraq. Either the strategy had to change or more resources had to be devoted to making the current strategy more plausible. In any event, the colonels were saying, we should not try to stay the course. “In every measurable category we were failing, and in fact we were on the path to defeat,” summarized Mansoor, another member of the group.

  The colonels had split over the way forward. Mansoor advocated sending more troops as part of a plan to eventually have a long-term but smaller U.S. military presence in Iraq, an approach he called “Go Long.” But the majority of the group, and especially its members from the Air Force and Navy, opposed the idea of a broad escalation—that is, a troop surge. “What the group said was, if we spike, it should be for a specified purpose, in order to, say, take down the Jaysh al-Mahdi in Sadr City,” Mansoor said, referring to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite extremist militia, also known as “JAM.” “They would have opposed just an increase in counterinsurgency forces.” Even more broadly, there were doubts in the group about whether the U.S. military really had enough troops available to escalate sufficiently to make a difference.

  The council had laid three choices before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The options we had were ‘Go Big,’ ‘Go Long,’ and ‘Go Home,’” said Mansoor, who was one of the group’s most influential members. His “Go Long” approach eventually would become U.S. policy.

  The next day, Thursday, December 14, Keane and Kagan went to give a more detailed briefing to Cheney. Being a former defense secretary, Cheney asked questions that were informed and precise. But being Cheney, he gave away very little. “I didn’t get any feedback,” Kagan shrugged.

  Military resistance was still running high after the pair’s two White House meetings. Underscoring that, the next day Keane and Kagan were scheduled to fly down to Central Command’s rear headquarters in Tampa, Florida. At the last minute, with their tickets in hand, they were told that their visit was canceled. They were offered no explanation. Treating a respected four-star general such as Keane in that backhanded way was a strong indication of how the military chain of command felt about having its thinking second-guessed by White House staffers, think tankers, and a retired general.

  Indeed, Casey, still in place as the top American commander in Iraq, would argue for another two weeks against a big troop increase. He didn’t know that he already had lost both the debate and his job. He had been planning to leave Iraq in the spring, but was told in December that he was being moved out in just a few weeks. “I left not really understanding what the hell had happened.” Even in 2008, he added, “The whole process with the surge and how that came to be” remained murky to him. Bush told others that he didn’t want to appear to be blaming Casey for executing a strategy that the president had approved, so Casey was to be given a “soft landing.” The general would be named Army chief of staff—ironically, the same position given Gen. William Westmoreland upon his removal from command of a failing war in Vietnam in 1968.

  A few days later, Vice President Cheney called Keane and asked if he would consider coming back on active duty and taking command in Iraq. Keane declined but said he was close to Petraeus, and knew and liked Odierno, and was willing to travel to Iraq as needed to advise both generals. This outcome was a victory for Keane, but it raised troubling questions about the ability of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his peers at the Pentagon to carry out their mission of figuring out how to fight and win. “Why did the American military establishment so fail to come up with a war-winning strategy that it was up to a retired general and a civilian think tank, AEI, to do their job?” asked retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew. “This is a stunning indictment of the American military’s top leadership.”

  SADDAM IN THE AIR

  Before dawn on the morning of Saturday, December 30, Saddam Hussein was taken to the former headquarters of the Iraqi military intelligence service. As an official read aloud his death sentence, he interrupted, “Long live the people, long live jihad, and long live the nation.” He added, “Down with the Persians and the Americans.” The hangman arrived, and Saddam met with a Muslim cleric.

  His bizarre ending was illicitly captured by someone in the room using a cellular phone camera. The condemned man, wearing a white shirt, black pants, and newly shined shoes, stepped to the gallows platform, his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs tied together. He appeared stone-faced, trying in his last act on earth to salvage whatever dignity he could from the day. A yellow noose was placed around his neck. It was Saddam’s turn to be interrupted. Someone yelled, “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada”—a shout of triumph invoking Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who rose to great power in the wake of the American invasion.

  Saddam, who had never been free to witness the rise of Shiite power in post-Saddam Iraq, responded sarcastically: “Moqtada?”

  “Go to hell,” someone shouted.

  “Long live Muhammed Bakr Sadr,” someone else shouted, referring to Moqtada al-Sadr’s uncle, a founder of the Dawa Party.

  “The man is facing execution,” pleaded Saddam’s prosecutor, Munqith al-Faroun, who was also present. “Please don’t.”

  Saddam dropped through the scaffold’s trapdoor as more than one thousand pounds of torque snapped his neck. A few minutes later he was pronounced dead. In both its lethality and unruliness, the event was, somehow, a fitting end to 2006 in Iraq. (Two weeks later, when Saddam’s half brother was hanged, his head came off, provoking more disapproval.)

  But that worst year of the war had one more ugly day left in it. On New Year’s Eve, two soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Baqubah and a third was killed in Baghdad, eerily bringing the U.S. military death toll in the war to precisely 3,000.

  4.

  A STRATEGY IS BORN

  (Winter 2006-7)

  When he left Iraq at t
he end of his first tour of duty early in 2004, Raymond Odierno, then a major general, had believed the war in Iraq was going well. “I thought we had beaten this thing,” he said several years later, as he began his second tour. “I could walk down the streets of Kirkuk, Tikrit, Baqubah, Samarra. I can’t do that now.” Returning in the fall of 2006 on a preliminary trip as a lieutenant general, a corps commander preparing to take command of the day-to-day operations of the war, he was stunned by how much worse Iraq felt. In the two big operations to improve security in Baghdad, “They had cleared areas but were unable to hold them.”

  He also began to worry that he was being set up to suffer defeat on his watch. “I felt like we were in the process of leaving, no matter what the consequence,” he said in one of a series of candid interviews. “I felt very disconcerted about that, because I had no control over that.”

  Oiderno’s strongest trait is determination. After that preliminary visit, he returned to his base at Fort Hood, Texas, thinking about how not to lose the war. On November 28, 2006, he and his key staff began the long flight from Texas to Iraq. Maj. James Powell, whose longish shock of hair combed sideways lent him a resemblance to a 1940s W. H. Auden, was exhausted and went to sleep. Somewhere over the Atlantic, Powell opened his eyes to see his boss, Col. Martin Wilson, the head of the corps’ planning office, standing before him and staring at him. Wilson had come to Powell directly from a conversation with Odierno, who had given him and his other key staff officers these orders: Come up with a plan to retake Baghdad.

  “When I got here, the situation was fairly desperate, frankly,” Odierno said. “The only thing I thought would decisively change it was doing something in Baghdad, and the only way to do that was to increase forces. I didn’t know if it would work.”

  If Jack Keane was the spiritual godfather of the surge, Odierno was its biological parent. Petraeus, arriving in Baghdad two months later, would become its adoptive father. In order to position the U.S. for a new strategy—that is, get additional brigades and use them differently—Odierno had to take on his direct superior, Gen. Casey, who in turn was backed by the entire chain of command. It is extraordinary to consider that the new strategy that would be implemented by the U.S. military in Iraq in 2007 was opposed by the U.S. military in both Baghdad and Washington. With the exception of Odierno, it came from outside the military establishment.

  LT. GEN. RAYMOND ODIERNO

  Odierno was an unlikely savior to appear in the midst of the Iraq war. There was little in his past to indicate that he would buck his entire chain of command and push the U.S. military in Iraq in a radically new direction. After growing up in New Jersey, he attended West Point and played varsity baseball there, most notably pitching against Ed Kranepool and Dave Kingman of the New York Mets in an exhibition game. He graduated in 1976 and became an artillery officer. He gained a reputation as the best of the conventional thinkers—intelligent, industrious, ambitious, and focused on using the tools the Army provided him, rather than discovering new and different ones. He deployed for the 1991 Gulf War and again for the Kosovo campaign eight years later.

  During his first tour in Iraq, commanding the 4th Infantry Division in the middle of the Sunni Triangle in 2003-4, he and his subordinates earned a reputation as heavy-handed, kicking in doors and rounding up tens of thousands of “MAMs”—military-aged males. As I wrote in my book Fiasco, about the first three years of the Iraq war, when Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq, questioned the 4th ID’s indiscriminate approach, she was told by its intelligence officer, according to a subsequent Army report, that Odierno didn’t care. “The division commander did not concur with the release of detainees for fear that a bad one may be released along with the good ones,” Maj. Gen. George Fay wrote.

  Fast said in a statement to investigators that Odierno’s attitude was “We wouldn’t have detained them if we wanted them released.” She asked retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer specializing in interrogation, to review the way intelligence was gathered from detainees. Herrington concluded that some U.S. commanders, in seeking to shut down the insurgency in their areas of operations, were using tactics that effectively made them recruiting sergeants for it. Herrington was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno’s division. “Principally due to sweep operations by some line units—the 4th ID was consistently singled out as the major offender—the number of detainees” was rising steadily, he wrote in his report to Fast. He emphasized that point five pages later: “Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some—the 4th ID is the negative example—are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib.”

  “Odierno, he hammered everyone,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Kellogg Jr., who was serving with the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad.

  “The 4th ID was bad,” said an Army intelligence officer who worked with them. “These guys are looking for a fight,” he remembered thinking. “I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians, our jaws dropped.”

  Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th ID, said he found the division’s approach to be indiscriminate. “It became a philosophy, ‘Round up all the military-age males, because we won’t know who’s good or bad.’ ”

  Col. Alan King had a similar view that the division helped the insurgency. “Every male from sixteen to sixty” that the division caught was detained, he said, “and when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency.”

  A subsequent review by the Army inspector general said interrogators reported “detainees arriving at the cage badly beaten. Many beatings occurred after the detainees were zip-tied by some units in 4ID. Some units wouldn’t take THTs [Tactical Human-Intelligence Teams] on raids because they didn’t want oversight of activities that might cross the line during capture.”

  The most striking instance of abuse in Odierno’s division occurred in January 2004, when some 4th ID soldiers forced two handcuffed detainees to jump into the Tigris River. One reportedly drowned. Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, their battalion commander, believed, as he put it later, that “we had to convince the Iraqi people that they should fear us more than they feared the insurgents.” He obstructed Army investigators trying to determine what happened with the detainees at the Tigris. Lt. Jack Saville would testify at his court-martial that he had discussed with Sassaman how to mislead those investigators. Despite that, Sassaman received only a written admonishment from his commanding general. “On 7 January 2004, you were briefed . . . that soldiers of the 1st platoon pushed two Iraqi men into the Tigris River causing one of them to drown,” Odierno wrote. “You ordered them to deny that the men were pushed into the river and to say that they were dropped off at the side of the road. Your conduct was wrongful, criminal and will not be tolerated.”

  Despite that conclusion, Odierno let Sassaman remain in command of the battalion for months, an outcome that shocked Poirier. “When you have a battalion commander who leads his staff in rehearsing a story about a murder—and he’s still in command?” Poirier said. “That’s not right.”

  It isn’t clear what led Odierno to reconsider his approach. He spoke at Basin Harbor, an academic conference on counterinsurgency run by Eliot Cohen in June 2005, and left the experts on the subject there distinctly unimpressed. He began by congratulating those present for holding such a conference because, he said, according to several participants, “we in the Army don’t think that much about counterinsurgency”—a comment that provoked some eye rolling. “He indicated he knew there were different ways of dealing with insurgency but also showed he was not certain that population-centered COIN was the way to do it,” said retired Marine Col. T. X. Hammes, one of the specialists who attended the meeting. In comments the following morning, some said they found him utterly conventional and so not really focused on the task at hand in Iraq.

  Between his first and
second tours in Iraq, Odierno served as assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position that has evolved into being the role of the U.S. military’s ambassadorship to the rest of the national security establishment. For example, the general holding the job frequently accompanies the secretary of state on overseas travel, in order to provide a military perspective as needed and also to keep the Pentagon attuned to U.S. diplomacy. This may have been the work that best prepared Odierno for the role he would play later in Iraq, as it broadened his view and acquainted him with the personalities and levers of power at State, CIA, and the White House. Notably, this was during a period when a schism was developing inside the government about the trend in Iraq, with State and CIA being far more pessimistic than the military or the White House. Odierno would return to Iraq fully aware that many well-informed officials thought the war was going badly, far worse than the White House, or even the generals in Baghdad, seemed to understand.

  Odierno was prepared, even determined, to operate differently on his second tour of duty in Iraq. “I think that before, he thought that through force you could achieve anything in the world,” said Emma Sky, a pacificistic British woman who would have an important role on his staff the following year. “I think he now has a much more sophisticated understanding of how society works,” she said. “I think he’s learned a tremendous amount.” Still she said she didn’t agree with how his time commanding the 4th ID was portrayed in Fiasco. She didn’t believe, she said, “that he somehow has turned from an ogre into a good man.”

  He didn’t much want to talk about how his transformation occurred, brushing aside the question. “I think everyone’s changed,” he said. “We’ve all learned. We came in here not thinking about counterinsurgency.” He didn’t like to dwell on those old errors, but sometimes in discussing details of current operations, he would refer to them. “One of the mistakes we made early on—and one of the mistakes I made—was not understanding the importance of the tribes.” He also pointedly and ruefully remembered being told by one of his superior officers in May 2003 that the fighting likely would last as long as 45 days. Odierno gives the impression that he doesn’t much care what reporters and politicians think about him, but very much what his peers in the Army do.