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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The team Petraeus assembled included Col. Michael Meese, son of the former attorney general, and himself a Princeton Ph.D. in economics; Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a veteran of battles in Najaf and Fallujah, who did a Ph.D. dissertation on Thomas Jefferson’s political theories; Lt. Col Miller, a Columbia University Ph.D. in political science; and Col. H. R. McMaster, former commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

  The last officer on that list, McMaster, seems to pop up repeatedly at key points in the Iraq war, like the military equivalent of Eliot Cohen, the ubiquitous bow-tied academic. McMaster was well known in the Army from his leading role in a key tank attack in the 1991 Gulf War. The Army’s official history of that war, Certain Victory, opens with him as a cavalry captain leading a charge of nine tanks. He became even better known for his nervy doctoral dissertation in history, written at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the failures of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War. Published in book form as Dereliction of Duty, it was widely read in the military in the 1990s, and in 1998 even made required reading for four-star commanders by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton. Early in the Iraq war he was a skeptical adviser to Abizaid at Central Command. Then, after taking command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, he posted what was arguably the first genuine success in the postinvasion war, his counterinsurgency campaign in the city of Tall Afar, in 2005-6. Later he was an influential member of the council of colonels at the Pentagon that informed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the U.S. military was on a path to defeat in Iraq. He arrived to advise Petraeus in Iraq just after finishing a paper sharply critical of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been fought. “A short-term approach to long-term problems generated multiple short-term plans that often confused activity with progress,” he charged.

  For his intelligence adviser, Petraeus tapped Derek Harvey, a retired Army colonel who had become a dissident inside the Pentagon, going to top officials in 2004 and telling them the situation in Iraq was more dangerous than they understood. Gen. Keane took him under his wing and insisted that Rumsfeld give him a hearing. He did, and then was sent to do the same with Bush—but was never invited back to give an update on his darkly pessimistic view of the war.

  Even the junior officers around Petraeus seemed to have a maverick streak to them. One of his aides, Capt. Elizabeth McNally, looked like a future general, having been first in her class at West Point and then a Rhodes Scholar. But in 2007 she decided to quit the Army when she got home from Iraq, partly to become a mother, but also, she said, because “I’m kind of disillusioned with the government now.” One of her successors would be Capt. Erica Watson Borggren, who had used her own Rhodes scholarship to study social policy and theology at Oxford, the latter subject because she was contemplating eventually leaving the military to become a missionary, perhaps in India. Her best friend at Oxford displayed on the wall of her room a photograph of a burning American flag.

  Stephen Biddle, the Council of Foreign Relations defense expert who had participated in the crucial White House meeting with Bush in December 2006, was surprised to be asked to join Petraeus in Baghdad because he had published an analysis of the Iraq war and had been told that Petraeus “disagreed heartily” with it. Another invitee was Toby Dodge, a British academic who “was fundamentally against the decision to invade. I thought it was badly planned and badly executed, and led Iraq into a civil war.” Nonetheless, he accepted the invitation because he also opposed the idea of the United States simply leaving as fast as possible.

  Petraeus also handpicked Lt. Gen. Dubik to take over the effort to train and advise Iraqi forces. It was known as MNSTC-I, which the military, in a Freudian moment, began pronouncing “min-sticky,” as if it were the ministry of intractable problems, which it effectively was. It wasn’t known publicly, but Dubik had long been an internal critic of the handling of the war, sending three memos to the leaders of Army from 2004 to early 2007, warning them that the United States was losing it. Dubik saw the entrance of Petraeus also as a cultural shift for the Army in Iraq, the ascendancy of the light Army, comprised nowadays of three divisions, the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, and the 10th Mountain. Those light-infantry units, lacking tanks and much other armor, had been easier to deploy, and so were assigned the odd jobs of the Cold War, from peacekeeping in the Sinai and Somalia to hurricane relief in Florida. The heavy Army, with its tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery pieces, and thousands of other pieces of gear, remained focused on the plains of Central Europe, where its mission was to be prepared to blunt the onslaught of a Red Army. “We were the window-doers throughout the Cold War,” said Dubik, smiling with both his mouth and his warm brown eyes. “The ‘real Army’ didn’t do windows,” he said, until forced to do so in Bosnia in 1995. The heavy Army also led the invasion of Iraq in 2003, perhaps feeling it was its turn, after the Special Operators and light infantry had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier. The initial headquarters for the occupation was V Corps, which was based in Europe. In 2007 Petraeus led the light Army into Iraq.

  The two most important advisers to Petraeus were two colonels, Bill Rapp and Pete Mansoor.

  Col. Rapp became the head of Petraeus’s unusual internal think tank, the Commander’s Initiatives Group, which the general established to ask the hard questions and push the envelope. It was intended to keep him one step ahead of events, escaping the traps that had snared earlier American commanders in Iraq of being reactive, or of acting on assumptions unthinkingly inherited from the Army’s culture, or of trying to follow White House rhetoric. That is, the president may call the insurgents evildoers—but why not cut deals with the enemy? And what about amnesties? Where did the French go wrong in Algeria as they thought they had won in the late 1950s, and how can we avoid repeating their errors? Is the task of the Army to destroy the nation’s enemies or to bring the war to a successful conclusion? It was not an office present in most U.S. military headquarters. Rapp, a big, slim, intense, earnest man, with close-cropped hair, graying at the temples, tends to look angry while thinking but is really just deep in thought. He had written a Ph.D. at Stanford on the reliability of democracies in war-fighting alliances.

  Rapp had arrived home from his previous tour in Iraq in October 2006, only to receive a call three months later from Petraeus, who wanted him to come to Baghdad.

  “Sir, I just left,” Rapp said, at a loss for words.

  “Yeah,” Petraeus replied. Rapp knew that meant: So what?

  “Sir, I’m still in command of my brigade,” Rapp added.

  “Let me make a phone call,” Petraeus said. Rapp knew what that meant as well: That obstacle soon would be gone.

  Two days later the Army chief of staff ’s office notified Rapp that his command had been curtailed. “Give it up and go to Baghdad,” Rapp told himself. He arrived in Iraq in mid-February. He would become an extra set of eyes and ears for Petraeus, accompanying him to almost every meeting, observing, taking notes, offering the general another view on what he was hearing and seeing, and what the next steps might be.

  Mansoor, who commanded a brigade of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad in 2003-4, received a Ph.D. at Ohio State for a dissertation on how U.S. Army infantry divisions were developed during World War II. He became Petraeus’s executive officer in Baghdad, a key figure in implementing the general’s decisions. Unusually in the U.S. Army, Mansoor was of Palestinian background. His father, born in Ramallah, emigrated to New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1938. “It was ten thousand people of German descent and one Arab family,” Mansoor recalled. They moved to Sacramento, where he proudly remembers that his mother, a schoolteacher, won awards for designing an “open classroom” approach. His father was a traveling salesman. In high school, Mansoor was valedictorian, student body president, and head of the math club. He also would graduate first in his class at West Point in 1982.

  In late March, Ryan Crocker flew to Baghdad to become the U.S. ambassador,
succeeding Zalmay Khalilzad. His arrival completed the most sweeping personnel turnover of the entire war, surpassing even the changes that came after the invasion when Franks and the chief of the Army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, stepped down. Now, as then, there was a new U.S. commander, who was working with a new deputy and a new ambassador, and, like then, they would have above them a new Army chief of staff and a new chief of the Central Command. But surpassing the changes of 2004, there also was in place a new Iraq director on the staff of the National Security Council and, most important, a new defense secretary. Also, they would be overseen by a new, Democrat-controlled Congress.

  Crocker and Petraeus would become close partners in 2007, creating almost the reverse of the dysfunctional relationship that had existed between the first permanent postinvasion U.S. envoy, Ambassador Bremer, and his military counterpart, Gen. Sanchez. They were determined to get along, to achieve the “unity of effort” whose lack had so plagued the American effort. Where Bremer had been a control freak, Crocker could be self-effacing. Where Sanchez dove into minutiae, Petraeus strove constantly to keep his head above water, to focus on the big picture. Neither Crocker nor Petraeus seemed to think invading Iraq had been a wise choice. On election night in November 2002, as the Bush administration was running up toward invading Iraq, Crocker had worked late in his Washington office and then gone home with a sinking feeling. “It was clear where it was going,” he recalled. “I told my wife, ‘We have just voted to have us a big old war.’ ”

  He hadn’t opposed the invasion wholeheartedly, he said one day in his Baghdad office, a few steps from Petraeus’s. “I was against it, but not happily,” he said. “This was a truly evil regime. I had spent two years here. I had seen it firsthand, just truly evil, and we are supposed to stand for something as the United States. It was a truly evil and active regime that was wearing us down.” So, he thought to himself, if you are against the invasion, what do you do, especially if you believe, as he did, that “sanctions weren’t going to last—they were already falling away.” Plus, he recalled, “I had to take seriously the WMD thing. So if you’ve got a guy who is as evil as he is, as violent as he is, armed as he was said to be—and I had no reason to doubt it—and we are losing our international containment, what are you going to do?” At the same time, “What kept me up at night wasn’t what I knew but what I didn’t know. And I knew full well we weren’t prepared to handle it. As a regionalist, my feeling was, Don’t do it.”

  Crocker would oversee an embassy stocked with similar skeptics. Retired ambassador Timothy Carney, for example, had served under Bremer early in the occupation, only to quit after two months, angry and frustrated with the sloppiness of American planning and its even worse implementation. In January 2007 he was asked to go back to oversee reconstruction efforts. Talking to State Department officials, he picked up a new “sense of reality,” and added, “It’s been a long time coming.” He accepted.

  LISTENING TO FOREIGNERS

  Underscoring how much the U.S. Army had been changed by Iraq, three of the most influential advisers added to the U.S. effort in Iraq were foreigners. One was David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency specialist. Another was Sadi Othman, the lanky, pacifistic Arab turned New Yorker. The third was Emma Sky, a small, fiercely anti-war British expert on the Middle East. None of them were particular supporters of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq or of the way the occupation had been handled.

  Kilcullen was perhaps the most outspoken and articulate of Petraeus’s advisers. Sandy-haired, apple-cheeked, and boyish, he enjoyed semimythical status as the man that Petraeus, the Army’s new king of counterinsurgency, had asked to be his counterinsurgency adviser. Also, as an Australian far from his own chain of command, Kilcullen, who had opposed the invasion of Iraq, could say in his Crocodile Dundee accent what American officials only thought privately. “In ’03, we confused entry with victory,” he said. “What we have to do now is not confuse departure with defeat.”

  He loathed his time in the cocoon of the Green Zone, where he felt he was just a sitting duck for incoming mortars. It was better to be out and about, embedding with brigade and battalion commanders, helping them seize the initiative whenever possible. Sitting in his closet-sized office in the old presidential palace, just around the corner from Petraeus’s, Kilcullen, the son of an Australian medievalist, exclaimed one day, “There’s a line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about the smell of defeat seeping out of the walls. I feel that being in this palace—the bureaucratic inertia, the feel of defeat, seeping out of the walls.” He came to hate the insularity of the place: “The system in the Green Zone is built to protect you from realizing there’s a war on.”

  His job was to help change the way American officers in Iraq thought about how to fight the war. Kilcullen briefed each group of incoming commanders how to operate. His prescriptions were almost the complete reverse of how most U.S. forces had operated in the first years of the war. Among his top ten rules were:

  • “Secure the people where they sleep.”

  • “Never leave home without an Iraqi.”

  • “Look beyond the IED: get the network that placed it.”

  • “Give the people justice and honor. . . . We talk about democracy and human rights. Iraqis talk about justice and honor.”

  • “Get out and walk”—that is, “patrol on foot.”

  Kilcullen found that last dictum, about literally putting boots on the ground, to be one of the hardest to get some units to adopt, especially those who were already in Iraq as command shifted from Casey to Petraeus. He concluded that American soldiers simply had grown accustomed to driving around Iraq, three or four to a Humvee. But that separated them from the Iraqi people, he argued. “In the eyes of the population, we ceased to be human beings,” he told commanders on his trips around Iraq to advise them on counterinsurgency techniques. “We were just big moving metal boxes from which Imperial Storm Troopers would occasionally emerge. When an IED blew off, it didn’t kill anyone they’d ever seen before.”

  He also told commanders that these “dismounted” operations ultimately would reduce casualties, because the insurgents wouldn’t waste a bomb just to kill one or two soldiers in a spread-out patrol. This promise came back to haunt him on one of the first days of major foot patrols, when four soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division were blown up while walking. He found himself unable to sleep and paced the marbled hallways near Petraeus’s office, mournfully wondering whether to recommend dropping the idea. He decided to helicopter down to observe the operations of that 10th Mountain unit. “It turned out they were so used to working in Humvees that they patrolled in clumps of four,” he said. He gave them a talk.

  A few months later, he was pleasantly surprised in an observation of the patrolling methods of another unit. “No one is doing ‘pure’ vehicle patrols anymore,” he reported. Some units were running foot patrols on one block, with Humvees operating in parallel a block away, available to move quickly to help them. Others left behind their vehicles altogether and conducted double patrols, with one squad on the street and another moving in tandem with it across the rooftops. “There’s a lot of night work happening too,” he said. This wasn’t just raids but also meeting people. “The locals are much more willing to talk freely at night.”

  Show Iraqis respect, he admonished commanders, but also hold your counterparts to standard. For example, he said, he was with an American patrol commander who approached an Iraqi checkpoint. The Iraqi soldiers had been instructed to stop and inspect every vehicle. “The Iraqi officer was urgently waving us to stop, but our patrol rolled through it at ten miles per hour. The company commander said, ‘We don’t stop for you people.’ I thought, ‘You’ve just lost that guy.’”

  One American battalion commander told Kilcullen that he planned to sever relations with a Shiite-dominated Iraqi army unit in his area that, he had learned, was detaining any Sunni it deemed capable of paying a ransom. Kilcullen recommended a diffe
rent method: Hold the Iraqi commander to standard. Ask him to show you the evidence behind the detentions. If he fails to do so, require that he release the Sunnis, pay them compensation, and formally apologize. “If he doesn’t do that, you withdraw support,” Kilcullen said.

  “Can I do that?” the American officer asked.

  “Fuck yeah,” Kilcullen said. “That’s what you’re here for.”

  He also argued at high levels that the Americans had been putting the cart before the horse in terms of communications. “We use information to explain what we’re doing on the ground.” The enemy, he said, “does the opposite—they decide what message they want to send, and then design an operation to send that message.” He called that more effective approach “armed propaganda.” The American equivalent would be putting American troops out into the neighborhoods to protect the population: Don’t say it, do it.

  Most controversially of all, Kilcullen and some others were thinking about how to “target” their allies in the Baghdad government—not to kill them, but to alter their behavior. Petraeus recalled that his initial set of talks with Maliki in February and March were “really tough,” with “voices raised.” One of the issues was that Maliki “had made Casey take the checkpoints off Sadr City.” Petraeus said he would accede if absolutely necessary—but made it clear that he would have to be pushed hard to do so.