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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  When Pace got back to the Pentagon, he sent down word to analyze how to get two to five additional brigades into Iraq, in terms of both transportation and troop availability. Barbero, on the Joint Staff, received the assignment. He liked the idea. “We’re finally going to try to do something more than just hold on until the Iraqis can take over,” he thought.

  Lt. Col. Charlie Miller, then working under Barbero, was surprised. Two weeks earlier, he recalled, neither the Pentagon nor the U.S. headquarters in Iraq had been particularly interested in a surge. In fact, when Casey’s command had been asked, he said, its response had been indifferent: “Sure, you can send an extra brigade or two, if you want.” The new order was “interesting,” he said, because the impetus clearly “didn’t come from inside the building. And it didn’t come from Iraq.”

  Even as Odierno’s planners were fleshing out the plan in late December, they secretly thought there was no way they were going to get five brigade combat teams, or BCTs. There was good reason to doubt it. Pace, who as the top U.S. military officer was the president’s direct adviser of military affairs, still wasn’t signed on to a full surge. Just after Christmas he flew to Texas to see the president at his ranch in Crawford and proposed the compromise of sending two brigades, plus keeping three more on tap ready to go.

  Keane had gotten wind of this odd “minisurge.” He also heard that Pace was telling officers on the Joint Staff who thought that two brigades was insufficient, “Don’t tell me what is wrong with this plan, tell me how to sell it at Crawford.” Keane called John Hannah, who had replaced the disgraced Scooter Libby as Cheney’s national security adviser, and told him that “the force level you are going to see presented at Crawford is inadequate and destined to fail.” He asked Hannah to give this question to Cheney or Bush to pose to Pace: “Is this a decisive force to succeed?” Privately, Keane thought that Odierno and Pace really needed eight to ten brigades, but he knew that only five could be made available.

  After the Crawford meeting, Keane got a call from a White House official: You’ll get the five Army brigades, plus two Marine battalions. It would amount to about 20,000 additional combat soldiers and eventually would include another 8,000 support troops.

  Pace returned to the Pentagon with a new urgency. Rather than the cool response he heard weeks earlier in discussions of the surge, Miller, the Joint Staff officer, recalled, it was, “Hey, we need to do this today.”

  The planners in Baghdad suddenly found themselves hit by an avalanche of RFIs—requests for information. Officials at the White House, the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the staff of the Joint Chiefs were bypassing several echelons in the chain of command to call Odierno’s headquarters directly and ask colonels there a question they now considered crucial: What would you do if you had more troops? Frequently those officers in Baghdad would zip back a quick e-mail—and only later realized how much influence they were having. “We would get a ping,” said Maj. Kent Strader, “we’d respond, and twenty-four to forty-eight hours later, it would show up in the national debate.”

  They also were getting questions for which they had no answers. “They would ask, you’ll get one brigade a month, where will it go?” said Maj. Powell, one of Odierno’s planners. “We didn’t know. It would depend on the evolving situation on the ground.”

  WWSHD?

  Once it was decided that the surge would have five brigades, the question was what to do with them. The plan devised at the American Enterprise Institute under Kagan’s purview had been simply to flood Baghdad with troops. “The Kagan plan had four brigades going into the city, two or three into Anbar, and none into the ‘belts,”’ or the areas surrounding Baghdad, said Powell, the planner. The plan as ultimately implemented would be more nuanced. The seed had been planted with Odierno by his next-door neighbor back at Fort Hood, Maj. Gen. James Thurman, who had commanded the U.S. troops in Baghdad in 2005-6. In a series of conversations, Thurman had passed along two lessons: Don’t give up any ground and do something about the car bombs coming into the capital from the surrounding countryside.

  Odierno laid down several new principles to his planners:

  • This wouldn’t be just Baghdad. He told the planners to figure out how to cut the roads, dirt paths, and riverways the bombers used to move into the city, what the military calls the “lines of communication.” His decision was influenced not just by Thurman, but also by heeding the revelations of generals who worked for Saddam Hussein. American analysts, studying the deployment of Republican Guard troops in 2002-3 outside the capital to the areas west and south of it, had assumed that this was done to reduce the ability of commanders to launch a coup. No, they were told: The elite troops were kept there, rather than in Baghdad, because that was where the trouble was.

  “I looked back: What would Saddam Hussein do?” Odierno said. “He would use Republican Guards to control those areas.” So Odierno decided that, as much as possible, he would deal with the Baghdad belts as much as the city itself. As every one of the five surge brigades arrived, he would ask himself whether to use it in the city or in the belts. The first two went into the capital. The next three went mainly into areas around the city. Ultimately, the 21 battalions (five brigades plus some Marine units) that came in as part of the surge would be divided about evenly between Baghdad and its outskirts.

  • Don’t make a move unless your presence is sustainable, and once you take an area, don’t leave it uncovered. “Don’t give up terrain,” he ordered his commanders. “Don’t try to do too much.” This emphasis on tactical patience was consistent with Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual, which had just been published in December but was new to the U.S. military in Iraq. “One principle I went by was that we would never give up anything we’d gained,” Odierno said. “So when I wanted to move a unit [out of an area], I’d ask, Can the Iraqis hold it?” If the answer was probably not, the unit would stay put. This also meant that the counteroffensive would take much longer than the American Enterprise Institute planners had thought or Bush administration officials believed.

  • In order to really protect the population, Odierno would have to go after more than just al Qaeda, because Shiite militias were intimidating Sunni civilians. Donnelly, a member of the AEI group, applauded the changes to the Kagan approach. “I don’t think we thought beyond making the Baghdad security situation better and establishing a rationale for keeping the United States in the war.”

  In December, Odierno also went to visit Col. MacFarland to check out what he had heard about strange doings in Ramadi. He also looked up Sheikh Sittar, who was leading the turning of the tribes in al Anbar province away from al Qaeda and toward the Americans. “I spent quite a long time speaking with him, and he told me how his mind-set changed,” he recalled. There was a lot of that going around.

  PETRAEUS, MOVING AROUND Washington and the Army to explain his new manual, was also quietly looking at a new way to operate in Iraq. Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant had coauthored an article the previous summer for the Army’s Military Review advocating moving troops out into the population. Titled “Producing Victory: Re-thinking Conventional Forces in COIN Operations,” it stated as a principle:

  For the local people to feel secure and provide intelligence, they must have 24-hour access to the counterinsurgent force. Units with control over an AOR [area of responsibility] should live in that neighborhood. . . . Having a fortress mentality simply isolates the counterinsurgent from the fight.

  On January 9, Petraeus e-mailed Ollivant to ask two questions: “Do you still believe what you wrote in ‘Producing Victory’? And can MND-B [the American headquarters for Baghdad] do it?”

  Ollivant wrote back: “Yes, with caveats.” He was in a position to know, having been for the previous 45 days the chief planner for the American division in Baghdad. Now he had top-level backing for the idea of putting outposts in the city.

  In January 2007, Keane flew out to Baghdad and met with Odierno’s planners for three hours. They we
re joined by some intelligence officers and H. R. McMaster. The purpose was to persuade Keane that it was crucial for the surge plan to deal with Baghdad belts, where they told him a fierce fight continued between Shiite expansionists and al Qaeda, which was casting itself as the defender of local Sunnis. They succeeded. At the end of the session there was a pause, recalled Wilson, Odierno’s chief planner. Then Keane spoke. “He kind of got a glowing look in his face and said, ‘You know, you folks get it.”’ Keane’s six-month fight to mount a counteroffensive was over. After this point, his role in the conduct of the war became smaller. As he put it, “They were in the execution phase.” His job was done.

  On the evening of January 10, Odierno’s chief planner, Col. Wilson, went to his room in Camp Victory’s military version of a trailer park and set his alarm for 5 A.M. As it rang, he rolled over in his bunk and reached out to switch on his small television. Half asleep, he watched President Bush tell the world about what Wilson and his office had written.

  BUSH RISES TO THE OCCASION

  As Col. Wilson watched in his aluminum hootch, George W. Bush delivered what may be remembered as the most impressive speech of his presidency. There was no dodging, no divisiveness, none of the brusque claims of extraordinary success that Vice President Cheney tended to fling about. Rather, as he stood awkwardly alone at a lectern in the White House library, Bush somberly accepted responsibility for a badly handled war, confessed that the course he had pursued hadn’t worked, and laid out a clear new plan, differentiating it from past efforts.

  He had looked, finally, into the abyss. “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people, and it is unacceptable to me,” he said early on. “Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.” This was exactly the right way to begin, setting the tone for everything that would follow. “It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq,” he continued, logically. He laid out with some precision how he envisioned it working, with a new Iraqi command structure for Baghdad and new Iraqi troops injected to conduct patrols and operate checkpoints.

  Then he got to the news: To make this work, he said, he would send “more than twenty thousand additional troops to Iraq.” It was only at this point that Col. Wilson and Odierno’s planners really began to believe that they would get all five brigades. In fact, they would get more, as a helicopter brigade and support troops were added three months later, eventually pushing the total addition to nearly 30,000. The mission of those new forces, Bush continued, would be “to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.” In other words, after more than four years of fighting, the “kill and capture” mind-set that had led to Haditha and to a losing effort was being replaced with classic counterinsurgency theory: The people are the prize.

  Immediately, he addressed those who doubted his plan—the majority of his audience, according to polls taken after the speech. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not,” he said. Using the word “listening” was a good touch, evoking the radio days of President Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II “fireside chats,” as when he confessed during the dismal days of February 1942, “We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it.” The difference, unfortunately, was that FDR faced the hard facts three months into World War II, while it took Bush more than three years to reach a similar point in his strategic thinking.

  Bush then laid out what he thought the difference was between the new effort and the failed Together Forward operations of 2006: “In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned.” Also, he said, the Iraqi government had blocked some operations—a reference to putting Sadr City generally off limits, along with some other key targets across Baghdad. This time, Bush said, “Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian influence will not be tolerated.”

  He then turned to the political goals he envisioned: passing a law to share oil revenues, stepping up Iraqi spending on reconstruction, and holding provincial elections later in 2007. The assumption here was that improved security would lead to such political breakthroughs. This would prove to be the weakest part of a strong speech.

  Turning back to security operations, he did the right thing in warning that “the year ahead [will be] bloody and violent.”

  He concluded with two other departures from the Bush administration’s habitual approaches. Bush pledged to be flexible: “If circumstances change, we will adjust.” And rather than question the integrity and patriotism of his opponents, labeling them as “cut and runners,” Bush said that, “Honorable people have different views, and they will voice their criticisms.”

  At the end he said, “We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours.” That unusual reference to God resonated with evangelical Christians, who sometimes use the phrase, while the “trying hours” again subtly evoked FDR.

  Bush effectively had turned over the fate of his presidency to Petraeus and Odierno. Over the next six months, he would mention Petraeus in speeches and press conferences at least 150 times. But he was at ease about the move. “At least from my perspective, the hardest part of making a big decision is the run-up to the decision,” Bush would tell Bob Woodward. “But once you make up your mind, it’s a liberating moment.”

  The moment felt different to others involved. In Baghdad, Odierno’s planners felt as if they were in a twilight zone. “We were on the other side of history,” said Powell. He explained that, “When you read history, you’re on that side of it. When you realize you’ve contributed to history, you’re on the other side of it.”

  Neither Keane nor Fred Kagan felt much joy. For Kagan, back in the United States, watching the speech on television at home with his wife, it was a similarly eerie moment. For a think tank analyst, he had achieved nirvana: An academic exercise he had held a month earlier had helped alter the American approach to a war, and the president was announcing that on national television. But he felt no elation. “We felt a burden,” he said. “We felt very nervous.” Also, he worried that the president was handling the changes the wrong way. He thought the speech went into too much tactical detail and also should have been postponed until Casey’s replacement, Petraeus, was in place and had had a chance to review the plans.

  The lack of clarity intensified the next day as Gates told the House Armed Services Committee that he thought the surge would be relatively short, “not eighteen months or two years.” As it happened, he was incorrect—and many of those involved in planning the surge already knew it. Kagan’s unease grew a few days later after Gen. Casey had taken one final pop at the plan, telling reporters that the surge might be over by “late summer,” just six or so months later. “We were wigging out over that,” Kagan said. “If you actually understood the nature of the task, you knew there was no way you could start bringing troops home in the summer.”

  In fact, the surge would last for eighteen months, with the last of the five additional brigades leaving Iraq only in the summer of 2008. What some insiders understood, but the president hadn’t said and Gates didn’t seem to grasp, was that the new strategy was a plan for a “long war.” First would come increased security. Then would come political progress, and with it, the building of a reliable army and police force. And all that—if it worked—would take many, many years. In sum, the short war approach that the United States had followed for years had been abandoned. The U.S. military had arrived in Baghdad in April 2003 with the expectation of largely leaving by that September. For three years after that, commanders had planned variations on that swift exit.

  Now the long war was about to
begin.

  PART TWO

  A NEW WAR BEGINS

  5.

  IF YOU’RE SO SMART . . .

  (Spring 2007)

  In early January 2007, David Petraeus was north of Los Angeles, riding in a rental car on Interstate 5 to see his aged father, Sixtus, a one-time Dutch sea captain who took refuge in New York when World War II broke out. Petraeus’s wife, Holly, was driving while the general answered his e-mail, using an air card on his laptop. His son was in the backseat. As if on signal, every cell phone people in the car were carrying began to ring. An aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs got through to Petraeus’s son with the message that Defense Secretary Gates was looking for Petraeus. One of Petraeus’s own subordinates called Holly with the same message. Petraeus looked down at his laptop screen and saw that the e-mail inbox was filling up with notes from colleagues who were hearing the same rumor: He was about to be offered command of the war in Iraq.

  Gates came on the line on one of the phones. Holly exited off the freeway and drove into a parking lot in a rundown neighborhood to ensure that the cell signal wasn’t lost. “I just want to confirm that you’re willing to take this one,” the defense secretary said to Petraeus.