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

by Thomas E. Ricks

  OBAMA IN IRAQ

  He arrived in late July, escorted by two senators who are Army veterans, Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. He flew from Kuwait to Basra, where he met with British and American generals. Then it was on to Baghdad.

  When Obama walked into the U.S. embassy, Petraeus and Crocker had him where they wanted him: on their turf. This was their chance to answer all the questions he had posed so well during the hearings and not given them a chance to answer. They assembled a huge, extremely detailed briefing and walked the candidate through the Iraq they knew, one where some progress had been made but where it could all fall apart. The meeting went nearly two hours, half an hour longer than scheduled.

  “We noted that we didn’t have the opportunity to answer [his question] . . . in the dialogue that we had in the hearings,” Petraeus said later. The issue for Obama, he said, was “We sought to . . . provide an answer to that question. And to do that we basically had an executive overview of the joint campaign plan, laid out the lines of operations, supporting activities.”

  The senators were a bit surprised to be given such a formal briefing, rather than a candid informal conversation. “This was a rare opportunity to have a discussion, not a step-by-step presentation that you would give to a committee or large audience,” said one participant who termed the meeting “serious but civil.”

  It was an oddly contentious encounter, in part because the two men are essentially similar—more cerebral and reserved than their peers, but also lean, focused, ambitious, and extraordinarily successful in their chosen fields. One is a paratrooper who went to graduate school at Princeton, the other a community activist who went to law school at Harvard. Most important, their vision of what America can and should do in Iraq is fundamentally fairly close, with both inclined toward what Petraeus has called a “minimalist” position, a polite way of rejecting the grandiose Bush vision and instead acknowledging that Iraq isn’t going to be a stable, quiet, peace-loving democracy anytime soon.

  Yet in this meeting, according to two participants, they tended to concentrate on their differences—at least when Obama was permitted to interrupt the lecture. Petraeus made it clear that he strongly opposed Obama’s notion of getting all the combat troops out by mid-2010, especially because security conditions in Iraq are always changing. Obama made it clear that his job as president would be to look at the larger picture—an assertion that likely insulted Petraeus, who justly prides himself on his ability to do just that. This is far from over, Petraeus said. Obama responded that it’s on the mend, and it’s time to divert resources elsewhere.

  “We are coming down, but I need the flexibility of not having a timetable,” Petraeus responded. The three senators observed that the Iraqis wanted a timetable—and so did they. At that point, Petraeus just looked at them. Some officers around Petraeus found Obama to be so self-confident that they privately referred to him as the “presumptuous nominee.”

  Obama left the meeting unswayed. Later that day, he said that he understood that Petraeus had “deep concerns,” especially about a timetable, but that “my job is to think about the national security interests as a whole and to weigh and balance risks in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their job is to get the job done here.”

  He also said he wouldn’t be “boxed” into either “rubber-stamping” the advice of generals or rigidly following a time line. At a press conference the next day, Obama elaborated on that apparent flexibility, saying that even after combat forces were pulled out, he expected a substantial military presence to remain.

  The senators spent the night in VIP trailers behind the embassy. The next day they boarded a Marine V-22 Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter but then tilts its rotors to fly like an airplane, and headed west to Ramadi, where they met with Marine officers and then with the brother of Sheikh Sittar, the tribal chief who had worked so effectively with Col. Sean MacFarland in Ramadi in 2006. Also attending were about 30 other sheikhs, clad in white robes with gold and black trim, as well as some Iraqi officials. “He came to us,” Mamoun Sami Rasheed, the governor of al Anbar Province, later said. This was about as big as wasta gets—having the future president of the United States haul out to the bank of the Euphrates to explain his views. “He asked many questions,” Rasheed continued. “We asked him not to pull out of Iraq.” Obama told him that he wanted to get the American combat forces out of Iraq in about 16 months. Rasheed replied that the U.S. military would need to stay at least three more years, because the Iraqi military isn’t ready to take over the mission. To that, he said, Obama promised, “The United States will not abandon Iraq.”

  That last promise may prove decisive in shaping the future of the U.S. effort in Iraq. If Obama keeps it, he almost certainly will have to break his vow to get all U.S. combat units out of Iraq by mid-2010. On the other hand, there is less to that promise than meets the eye. The phrase “combat units” is really meaningless in the context of the Iraq war, where there is no front and where all troops, front line or not, are vulnerable. What the American people care about is whether U.S. troops of any sort are getting killed. Most deaths in the war have been caused by roadside bombs, which don’t distinguish between front-line infantry and support units. Indeed, a transport soldier whose mission is to conduct convoys is more likely to get bombed than an infantryman who mainly operates on foot.

  Gen. Austin, the number two commander in Iraq, said that his impression was that Obama “really took to heart some of the things we told him.” Obama left people in Iraq with the sense he would be flexible and consider conditions on the ground and would be able to adjust his 16-month timetable if he saw the need. In sum, Obama, Bush, Maliki, and Petraeus all seemed to be saying more or less the same thing: We all want the U.S. military out of Iraq eventually, but want to do it in a way that doesn’t push the country over a cliff. The long war view appeared to have won.

  PETRAEUS OUT OF IRAQ

  It has happened to hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Leaving Iraq is a moment of ambivalence. One is pleased to be going home and anticipating a reunion with one’s family, but is also conflicted by the nagging sense of leaving in the middle of the fight, with much unfinished business. There is a sense of lightness, of a weight being lifted, followed by a recognition of how much a mental and physical strain it has been to fight in Iraq. When Petraeus got on the airplane to leave Iraq in mid-September 2008, he experienced all these mixed emotions. He and others felt “a quiet pride,” he said, “that we helped Iraq step back from the brink of civil war and to essentially go . . . from the brink to the mend.” But in his case, the sense of relief didn’t last long. “I think there might have been a lifting of the weight for five minutes and then someone started talking about Centcom.”

  At his new assignment at Central Command, Petraeus would face a new round of troubles, and also would be dealing with a new president who had made it clear that he has strong strategic views of his own. Looming largest before Petraeus was the war in Afghanistan, which is really a war in both that country and Pakistan, with Pakistan the more important part of it, because Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons and remains a hotbed of Islamic extremism. On top of that, the world financial crisis was already beginning to hit Pakistan and threatened to put a new crimp in the U.S. military as America was forced to tighten its belt. In addition, the American face-off with Iran over that country’s nuclear ambitions continued to threaten to escalate into a crisis that could change the region. Nor was Iraq going to be resolved anytime soon.

  Even before yielding command in Iraq, Petraeus flew to Lebanon. The trip suggested that if no one else had heeded Crocker’s concerns about the possible “Lebanonization” of Iraq, he had. He entered Beirut just after a new government was created that gave Hezbollah—an armed militia independent of government control—and its allies 11 of 30 seats in the new cabinet. The visit came as American intelligence analysts in Baghdad were suggesting that the Sadr organization’s future course would be to
try to become the Hezbollah of Iraq, an armed force outside the government that provides services and also holds great influence over the actions of the government. A major difference between Sadr and Hezbollah is that thus far, Iran has not provided Sadr’s militia with Kornet anti-tank laser-guided missiles and the other sophisticated weaponry it is said to have shipped to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah used that matériel to great effect in its 2006 war with Israel, fighting the Israeli military to a standstill and gaining wasta across the Arab world. If Iran provided such weaponry to its allies in Iraq, it would be escalating the war there significantly, and likely would require the U.S. government to reevaluate its approach to the war and even consider actions inside Iran.

  It was a high-profile trip for Petraeus to take as his first move as the incoming chief of Centcom. He insisted it wasn’t the harbinger of a more aggressive stance. “This is not a provocative-type initiative,” he said, but rather “to get a sense of the situation in a country where Iran has been asserting substantial influence.”

  The biggest change Petraeus is apt to bring to Centcom is in the handling of Afghanistan, where he likely will reach out to “reconcilable” enemies while trying to isolate and kill those deemed “irreconcilable.” The best indication of this isn’t anything he has said, but his pick for his deputy at Centcom: John Allen, the Marine general who loved Gertrude Bell, and also had become the de facto American ambassador to Anbar’s sheikhs, playing a major role in the turning of the Sunni insurgency in that province.

  I’d be surprised if Petraeus remains at Centcom for more than two years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him at some point in the Obama administration, picked to be national security adviser or for another senior national security position. Petraeus wouldn’t have to leave the military to move to the White House. For example, Colin Powell did it as an active-duty officer late in the Reagan administration. He said he wasn’t interested in writing a memoir. “I am not interested in a sort of rehashing.” He cited Gen. George Marshall’s refusal after World War II to write an autobiography, even when doing so would have made him a wealthy man. “It would cause some discomfort and I don’t have any desire to do that,” Petraeus said. Crocker had a similarly clear response: “absolutely not.” If they stick to that, one of many oddities of the Iraq war will be that the officials who failed—L. Paul Bremer, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, even Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman—will leave behind memoirs while those who were more successful remain officially silent.

  SURPRISES AT HOME

  When Petraeus got home, he was moved to be invited to the State Department by Condoleezza Rice, who surprised him with an award for distinguished service. He was pleased especially because his time in Iraq had followed a spell in which the State Department and the Pentagon often viewed each other as enemies. He had brought about reconciliation. Always looking for opportunities to teach, he used the occasion to underscore “the importance, the imperative, of unity of effort in endeavors such as the one in Iraq.” Crocker also was recognized, but had to accept his medal remotely, because he was still in Baghdad. He had plans to retire in February 2009 and retreat to a hideaway in the high desert of eastern Washington.

  After being home for a few weeks, Petraeus grew dismayed that people didn’t seem to understand quite how difficult the previous 18 months had been in Iraq, especially for the troops who had implemented the new approach on the streets and in the palm groves of Iraq. In his view, it was a “horrific nightmare” that simply was being forgotten. During the surge, some 1,124 American soldiers had been killed and 7,710 wounded. About another 24,000 Iraqi soldiers, police officers, and civilians were killed, according to an accounting based on news reports.

  At about the same time, Odierno was surprised when Bob Woodward’s book, published just as he took command from Petraeus in Iraq, credited White House aides and others in Washington with cooking up the surge. From Odierno’s perspective—and that of many other senior officers in Iraq—it had been more or less conceived and executed by Odierno in Baghdad, with some crucial coaching from Gen. Keane. “We thought we needed it [the new strategy] and we asked for it and we got it,” he said, puzzled that President Bush’s aides would present such a different account to Woodward. “You know General Petraeus and I think . . . [that] I did it here, [and] he picked it up. That’s how we see it. And so it’s very interesting when people back there see it very differently.” Of course, he said, ultimately the president had to make the policy decision to do it, and some White House aides encouraged that step. But, he continued, “I mean, they had nothing to do with developing” the actual way it was done, he said. “Where to go, what they [the soldiers] would do. I mean, I know I made all those decisions.”

  Different people have different views. Even so, without question, Odierno hasn’t gotten the public recognition he deserves, not only for his role in developing and implementing the surge, but also for his overall adaptation to the Iraq war. If the ability to adjust effectively in wartime is the measure of generalship, then Odierno has come further than any other American general in the war and is as successful as any of them, including Petraeus.

  A FRAYED MILITARY

  One of the themes of this book is that the U.S. military adjusted as a whole in 2007 making radical, far-reaching, and unexpected changes in its approach to the Iraq war. “I think in the last two years, the Army feels different,” observed Lt. Col. Suzanne Nielsen, an aide to Petraeus and a professor at West Point. “It really began to think about outcomes. Before that, it judged itself a lot by processes and inputs.” That is, it had been judging its performance by effort expended rather than by results achieved—a metric that tends to waste resources and be counterproductive, often encouraging mindless activity more than insight or patience.

  The improvement has come at a cost we can only guess at. This worry surfaces publicly on occasion, but is a major subject of discussion among military leaders. In the short term, there is worry about readiness and about bad actors around the globe thinking that Uncle Sam might be too preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan, and a global financial crisis to respond to other challenges. But the deeper and more abiding worry is about the military of ten or fifteen years from now. How long will it take to recover from Iraq? It required years to rebuild the Army and Marine Corps after the Vietnam War, and especially to recruit and train a new cadre of professional non-commissioned officers, the backbone of the American ground forces.

  The last few years have seen soldiers burning out after repeated tours of duty in the war, with high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder among combat veterans. Rates of suicide and divorce have been increasing. Officers and sergeants are leaving in greater numbers. Some 50,000 soldiers now have prescriptions for narcotic pain relievers. In one unit, the 509th Engineer Company, based at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, about a third of the soldiers were found to be abusing drugs. In another worrisome sign, in the fall of 2008, five soldiers at Fort Carson, Colorado, were suspected in a series of killings after their return from Iraq.

  The quality of recruits also has been dropping, with only 70 to 80 percent of new Army enlistees having high school degrees, well below the salad days of the 1990s, when the figure regularly was above 90 percent. (Repeated studies have found that recruits who finish secondary school are much more likely to succeed in the armed forces than are dropouts.) The military also has been admitting more recruits with criminal records, with 511 convicted felons entering the Army in fiscal year 2007. In that year, more than 27,000 “conduct waivers” were issued to troubled recruits by the Army and Marines.

  Lower quality recruits also affect how other soldiers perceive their service. In the mid- and late 1970s, the surge in recalcitrant, poorly educated, and ill-disciplined new soldiers deepened the downward cycle of the Army, making some sergeants decide to get out. No one can tell at this point whether that unhappy pattern will again plague the Army.

  In recent years many seasoned but still young officers have left the Army, despite the lu
re of big bonuses to stay in. Lt. Col. Charlie Miller taught at West Point from 1999 to 2002 and knows many of the young officers who are at the point of deciding whether to leave, having served their obligatory five years. “They are just flying out,” he said.

  What types of captains are getting out? “Almost all of them,” said Capt. Liz McNally, another Petraeus aide. That includes her, and most of her friends from West Point, she said. A big part of this decision is the desire to have a normal life, and raise a family, after seeing two or three tours of duty overseas since 2001. Heavy deployments are inflicting “incredible stress” on soldiers and their families and posing “a significant risk” to the military, Gen. Richard Cody, then the Army’s vice chief of staff, said early in 2008. “I’ve never seen our lack of strategic depth be where it is today.”

  But the nature of the war in Iraq also is causing some to leave the military. As Lt. Col. Ollivant, a key planner in the surge, had noted, during the first several years of the war it was deeply frustrating for younger officers to report to men who had never done what they were doing, and often didn’t understand the situation. Until recently, many senior officers did not recognize how ill prepared they had been. The Army could be quite unforgiving of the missteps of younger soldiers, but enormously understanding when it came to much larger mistakes by generals. Captains were subjected to rigorous after-action reviews, but generals, inexplicably, were treated with kid gloves. As Lt. Col. Paul Yingling put it in a widely noticed essay, “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

  12.

  OBAMA’S WAR