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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Fastabend was even more bothered by how the government had reacted a few weeks earlier to the suicide bombing of the Iraqi parliament, an incident that killed eight in the worst breach of security the Green Zone had ever suffered. One Iraqi official told him, “We’ll show them, we’ll meet tomorrow.”

  “Well, I was just over there, and it needs to be cleaned up,” Fastabend responded.

  “Oh yeah, it will be,” anotehr Iraqi promised.

  He went back the Council of Representatives building the next morning just to check. It was still a bloody mess. “The motherfucker’s legs were still on the floor, and parts of him were all over the walls,” he recalled. He called one of the Iraqis: “You think you’re going to walk the press through here in twenty minutes?”

  • Finally, Fastabend was mulling something that was politically explosive back home. “I think you announce a withdrawal schedule.” Moqtada al-Sadr couldn’t live with a big U.S. force in Iraq, which he deemed an occupation. But maybe, Fastabend calculated, he’d want a small presence, of 5 brigades, or perhaps 35,000 troops, just to keep him safe from the Sunnis. “Some people say he wouldn’t accept it. I say, ‘Take a risk.”’ He explained: “So we say to him, we’ll give you a timetable. Maybe come down to twelve [brigade combat teams] by the end of 2008, and five by a year later.”

  His bottom line: “If this is the decisive struggle of our time—be decisive.” Fastabend didn’t think he was asking too much. “Considering that the alternative is getting chased out of here, it doesn’t seem that audacious to me.”

  There are two kinds of plans, he explained—those that fail and those that just might work. “If we fail, we are getting ready for a pretty major civil war, leading to a regional war. If things work, we are in an accommodation phase” that might lead to a preserved Iraq. So, he said, play according to the stakes.

  Fastabend was correctly pointing to a major flaw in the American approach in the war from 2003 to 2006. For years, U.S. commanders had tended to seek strategic gains—that is, winning the war—without taking tactical risks. They ventured little and so gained less. By making the protection of their own troops a top priority, and by having them live mainly on big bases and only patrol neighborhoods once or twice a day or night, they had wasted precious time and ceded vital terrain to the enemy. Also, their priorities undercut any thought of making the protection of Iraqi civilians their mission. That was literally seen as someone else’s job—Iraq soldiers and police.

  Capt. McNally, who studied the Fastabend’s essay, concluded that its core message was “It’s put up or shut up time.” The way forward it recommended, she explained, was, “Take risks. Otherwise, we just keep going along, and we lose six soldiers once a week when the Strykers [wheeled armored personnel carriers] get blown up.”

  One risk Fastabend didn’t mention in his essay was the internal one Petraeus was taking on as he clashed with his immediate superior, Adm. William Fallon, who had succeeded Abizaid as chief of the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Petraeus was determined to speak his mind, leading to what would amount to a running feud with Fallon, his ostensible boss.

  A FOUNDATION FOR STRATEGY

  It is axiomatic that good tactics can’t fix a bad strategy, but that a good strategy tends to fix bad tactics, because the inappropriateness of those individual actions becomes self-evident when seen against the larger scheme. For example, in a mission where the top priority explicitly is protecting the people, there would be no excuse for an incident like Haditha.

  The biggest single strategic change in Iraq in 2007, the one that preceded all others and enabled them, may also have been the least noticed one: a new sobriety in the mind-set of the U.S. military. It wasn’t just the Bush administration that had taken years to face reality in Iraq. The military also was slow to learn. McMaster’s successful campaign in Tall Afar in late 2005, for example, seemed to be largely ignored by top commanders, or dismissed as irrelevant. Despite the attention given to Tall Afar by the media, there seemed to be no concerted effort in the Army to discern if the success there might be replicated elsewhere. By the beginning of 2007, though, the U.S. military had been fighting in Iraq longer than it fought in World War II. It had been flummoxed and humbled by its struggle in the Land Between the Rivers, trying nearly everything in its toolbox of conventional methods, and not finding much that promised a successful outcome. Finally, it was ready to try something new.

  It had to come a long way. In the feel-good days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11, and even for some time after, when the U.S. military was the armed wing of “the sole superpower,” Pentagon officials liked to talk about “rapid decisive operations.” That was a term for, as one 2003 study done at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies put it, the devastating cumulative effect of “dominant maneuver, precision engagement and information operations.” The technocentric notion behind it was that U.S. forces, taking advantage of advances in sensors, communications, computer technology, and long-range weaponry and precision logistics, all areas in which it excelled, would fight so quickly and adeptly that the enemy would never have a chance to catch up and understand what was happening. Blinded, confused, and overwhelmed, the enemy’s will would break, U.S. forces would triumph, and everyone would live happily ever after. “We need rapidly deployable, fully integrated joint forces capable of reaching distant theaters quickly and working with our air and sea forces to strike adversaries swiftly, successfully, and with devastating effect,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in January 2002. Thus, he continued, we would possess “the option for one massive counteroffensive to occupy an aggressor’s capital and replace the regime.”

  One of the people in the audience that day was Gen. Tommy Franks, then the chief of the U.S. Central Command, and 14 months later the commander of U.S. forces invading Iraq. The “rapid decisive operations” approach culminated in Franks’s plan for going into Iraq, in which he sought to substitute speed for control. “Speed kills” became his mantra, repeated endlessly to his subordinates. But as U.S. forces found after they raced from Kuwait into Baghdad, speed could temporarily substitute for mass in military operations but wasn’t the same as control. Once the Americans got to the capital, they stopped moving. Lacking both mass and velocity, they soon lost control of the situation.

  Col. McMaster would argue later that the very concept of rapid decisive operations had hamstrung American commanders as they entered the country, because it had “artificially divorced war from its political, human, and psychological dimensions. So, if flexibility hinges on a realistic estimate of the situation going into a complex situation, we were behind at the outset.” It would only be after American commanders and strategists began paying attention to the most basic human elements—tribes, blood feuds, and fights over water, money, and women—that they would begin to understand the war they were in, which Clausewitz maintains is the first and most important task of the military leader.

  “Our mindset was not to kill, it was to win,” recalled Lt. John Burns, who led a scout platoon in Baghdad during the Petraeus counteroffensive. “We constantly evaluated our situation and made certain we were fighting the war we had and not necessarily the one we wanted.”

  But that sort of seasoned understanding would come only after four years of struggle that more often was counterproductive than not. As the war for Iraq began in earnest in the summer and fall of 2003, U.S. commanders, surprised by the intensity and duration of the resistance to their presence, emphasized capturing and killing their enemies. But every time they captured key leaders, more seemed to spring up. By 2007 the military had realized that this approach was not leading toward success. “I think if the last four years in Iraq show anything, it’s that you can’t get by on brute force alone, and our generals should understand that by now,” Col. Mansoor, Petraeus’s executive officer, said one day in Baghdad late in 2007.

  Under Petraeus, many did indeed get
it. “You can’t kill your way out of this kind of war,” said Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in a comment that many repeated that year.

  In remaking itself in the 1970s and ’80s as a blitzkrieg force, the Army may have repeated the mistakes of the German army of World War II, observed Andrew Krepinevich, the defense intellectual who wrote the seminal work on the Army’s failure in Vietnam. “In World War II, the Germans were very good tactically, but they were terrible at the strategic level,” he said. Thus the rebuilding of the Army during the 16 years from the fall of Saigon to the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, rather than being new and innovative, may actually have signaled the end of an era. As retired Army Col. Bob Killebrew, a thoughtful strategic thinker, put it, “We may well look back on the ’90s as the final spasm of blitzkrieg.” That observation casts a new light on the two “thunder run” tank charges that the Army used to penetrate Baghdad during the invasion: They may have been not the harbinger of a new, more agile Army, but rather a last blaze of glory for the heavy conventional force, a miniature version of its glory days of 1944-45 in Europe and 1991 in Kuwait.

  After four years of failure in Iraq, the U.S. military began to find effectiveness—at least tactically—as its leaders finally became resigned to the reality that the way to success was conducting slow, ambiguous operations that were built not around technology but around human interactions. “Be deliberate,” Odierno would order his subordinates. Show “tactical patience,” advised a brigade commander. It became common to hear American commanders counsel their frustrated soldiers to take it “Shwia, shwia”—Arabic for “slowly, slowly.” As the new counterinsurgency manual said, they needed to be prepared to take years to succeed. The key to this mode of warfare was slowly seeking accommodation, pulling the population over to one’s side, even if that sometimes meant cutting deals with people who had killed American troops. As Emma Sky said one day, “We are dealing with guys with blood on their hands.”

  Sky, who had advised the U.S. military for a year in 2003-4, saw the commanders as having an entirely new mind-set in 2007. “In ’03, the guys were Christian crusaders seeking revenge for 9/11. Today they are advising Iraqis in a way they couldn’t back then. They have completely transformed the way they work with Iraqis. It is a tremendous change. It’s not just the Sunnis or the Shiites who have changed. We all have changed.”

  The entire approach was distinctly alien to the rapid, decisive, mechanistic, and sometimes Manichean mind-set that had been taught to a generation or two of American commanders. It had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with dealing with some of the oldest of human traits—eye-to-eye contact and heeding the values and ways of tribes and their leaders. What was going on in Iraq in 2007, as Kilcullen put it, was “a counterrevolution in military affairs, led to a certain extent by David Petraeus.”

  The pre-Iraq, triumphalist U.S. military also was fond of talking about “information dominance.” What this tended to mean in reality was amassing data rather than understanding. For most of the time the U.S. military has been in Iraq, it actually has tended to be information poor. As Warren Buffett, the wise billionaire, once observed, if you’ve been playing poker for half an hour and you don’t know who the patsy at the table is, then you’re the patsy. Too often, U.S. troops, cut off both linguistically and physically from the Iraqi populace, operating in a harsh climate amid an alien culture, had been made patsies. This was not their fault but that of their leaders who didn’t understand the task at hand of conducting a counterinsurgency campaign.

  Looking back, Maj. Mark Gillespie, a military adviser in Iraq, recalled that in early 2006, he was “reaching terminal velocity and pulling my hair out and trying to figure out why people just don’t get it. Well, it wasn’t them who weren’t getting it, it was me who wasn’t getting it.”

  American soldiers would really only start getting the requisite amount of information after they moved out into the population in 2007. In retrospect, this seems like common sense. After all, Clausewitz, often seen incorrectly as the most conventional of war theorists, notes that the people are the greatest single source of information available. “We refer not so much to the single outstandingly significant report, but to the countless minor contacts brought about by the daily activities of our army,” he explained.

  The new humility of American commanders amounted to the starting point for the new strategy. After trying it their way for years, they now were going to try it the Iraqi way. So, for example, rather than try to build on their own individualistic core values of freedom and “one-man, one-vote” democracy, they began to rely on Iraq’s more communitarian values, which often revolve around showing and receiving respect. “They felt disrespected, dispossessed, and disgusted,” Petraeus said one day. “All they wanted was”—he began singing the letters in the old Aretha Franklin hit—“R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” (Indeed, one of the new Iraqi political parties that would form called itself “Dignity.”)

  With humility came its twin, candor. “There’s a more open environment now,” Capt. McNally said. “People used to maybe think [negative] things, but they didn’t say them.”

  This new sobriety was the intellectual context for the reduction in the goals of the war. This is a controversial point, because that shrinkage has never really been announced or even acknowledged. But it was put into practice every day as a smaller, narrower set of aims. The goal was no longer the grandiose one that somewhat murkily grew out of the 9/11 attacks and was meant to transform Iraq and the Middle East—what the old Wolfowitzian Iraq hawks had called “draining the swamp” in which terrorism grew. Instead, the quietly restated U.S. goal was to achieve a modicum of stability, to keep Iraq together, and to prevent the war from metastasizing into a regional bloodbath. That meant finding what one official called “a tolerable level of violence” and learning to live with it.

  “Not rhetorically, but in practice we have” limited the goals of the U.S. effort, Mansoor said one day early in 2008. Trying out a phrase Petraeus would use publicly four months later, he said, “We are willing to accept less than a Jeffersonian democracy. . . . The rhetoric of our national leadership is still about freedom, but on the ground, there’s a realization there is going to have to be Iraqis figuring this out.” (In April 2008, Petraeus would tell the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “In terms of what it is that we are trying to achieve, I think simply it is a country that is at peace with itself and its neighbors. It is a country that can defend itself, that has a government that is reasonably representative and broadly responsive to its citizens, and a country that is involved in, engaged in, again, the global economy. Ambassador Crocker and I, for what it’s worth, have typically seen ourselves as minimalists. We’re not after the holy grail on Iraq; we’re not after Jeffersonian democracy. We’re after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.”) Petraeus began keeping an eagle eye on the president’s speeches, using their weekly video teleconferences to convey caution against inflating the rhetoric. He usually succeeded but not always.

  There was good reason for this quiet ratcheting down. As Steven Metz, an astute strategic analyst, put it, encouraging democracy was at odds with the larger goal of stability: “Our current strategy is based on the delusion that we can have stable, or modulated democratization,” he said. “Few things are more destabilizing and prone to chaos than democratization. I think we can have either democratization or stabilization. The issue is whether we can tolerate several decades of often-violent instability while democratization takes root.”

  THE HARDEST STEP

  The surge really began even before the first of the surge brigades arrived. That may sound paradoxical but isn’t, because the surge was more about how to use troops than it was about the number of them. The first new brigade wouldn’t fully arrive until February, but as the bombings increased in January, the 1st Cavalry Division, which already was in the country, escalated its efforts to protect the population, seeking new ways to protect markets, neighborhoods, main roads,
and bridges, said Col. Tobin Green, the division’s chief of operations, and a friend and former student of Eliot Cohen. “I believe that was a turning point,” Green said, “a visible sign of commitment to protecting the Iraqi people.”

  Moving American soldiers from big isolated bases and into new posts of 35 men (if platoon-sized) to around 100 (if manned by a company) located in vacant schoolhouses, factories, and apartment buildings in Baghdad’s neighborhoods was the hardest step. Essentially, U.S. forces were sallying out to launch a counteroffensive to retake the city.

  Seeking to translate the strategy into operational and tactical sense, Odierno was looking downward, monitoring the adjustments of subordinates from division commanders to platoon leaders. “That’s especially difficult with units that were already there,” recalled Keane, his mentor. “He was transitioning those forces from a very defensive strategy to an offensive strategy.” On top of that, having only the minimum amount of troops that he and Keane thought he needed, Odierno began to move them around in order to maximize their effectiveness. “He took risks,” Keane said. “The easy thing would have been to put all the surge brigades into the city.” Instead, following the “What would Saddam do?” approach, Odierno put much of his combat power outside the capital. This was the biggest difference between Odierno’s plan and the one Keane and Kagan had pulled together at the American Enterprise Institute. Eventually, he would split his total available combat power evenly between the city and its surroundings, with six brigades in each.