One night in January 2004, some of Sassaman’s soldiers forced two handcuffed detainees to jump into the Tigris River. One was reported to have drowned. Sassaman obstructed the subsequent investigation, instructing his soldiers to lie and say that they had dropped the Iraqis at the side of the road. One officer, Lt. Jack Saville, later testified, in his own court-martial trial, that he had discussed with Sassaman how to mislead the Army investigators. This time Gen. Odierno gave Sassaman a written reprimand. “Your conduct was wrongful, criminal, and will not be tolerated,” Odierno stated. Yet in fact it was tolerated, by Odierno and by the Army. Official disinclination to relieve commanders had grown so intense that even at that point Odierno did not relieve Sassaman. Lt. Col. David Poirier, an MP battalion commander who witnessed the affair, was astounded: “When you have a battalion commander who leads a staff in rehearsing a story about murder—and he’s still in command?” Sassaman was allowed to retire quietly after his time in command.
It all sounded a bit like the U.S. Army in Vietnam, echoing Gen. Koster’s own letter of reprimand after My Lai. The biggest difference was that, four decades after the Indochina war, the American public was less critical of its military—and so the military was not forced to conduct the kind of self-examination that could have helped it correct its course.
CHAPTER 29
George Casey
Trying but treading water
S anchez was replaced in Iraq in mid-2004 by Gen. George Casey, a deeply conventional man who tried to convince the Army to operate unconventionally.
Casey was an Army insider—a four-star general and, in fact, the son of the highest-ranking American casualty of the Vietnam War, a division commander who was killed in a July 1970 helicopter crash. He knew the Army needed to start operating differently in Iraq. He developed a formal campaign plan, something Sanchez had never actually done. More significantly, he asked two counterinsurgency experts, Col. Bill Hix and retired Lt. Col. Kalev Sepp, to review what units were doing and make suggestions. Sepp, a Special Forces veteran of El Salvador with a doctorate from Harvard, reviewed every battalion, regimental, and brigade commander in Iraq and concluded that 20 percent of them understood how to conduct counterinsurgency operations, 60 percent were struggling to do so, and 20 percent were not interested in changing and were fighting conventionally, “oblivious to the inefficacy and counterproductivity of their operations.” In other words, the majority of U.S. units were not operating effectively.
Casey—his misgivings confirmed by that review, and despairing of the Army being able to train officers in counterinsurgency before they deployed to Iraq—started the Counterinsurgency (COIN) Academy at the big military base in Taji, just north of Baghdad. There, he gave newcomers one-week courses in the basics. “Because the Army won’t change itself, I’m going to change the Army here in Iraq,” he told subordinates. Just capturing a known insurgent is not necessarily a tactical gain, the academy taught the students, if it is done in such a way that it creates new enemies. As the course’s textbook put it, “The potential second- and third-order effects . . . can turn it into a long-term defeat if our actions humiliate the family, needlessly destroy property, or alienate the local population from our goals.” Even so, both Casey and the Army were slow to adjust and had a difficult time doing so. For example, a key tenet of classic counterinsurgency theory is that troops should live in small outposts among the people, to better understand them and to deter the enemy from controlling them. Yet Casey, in 2006, was determined to close smaller outposts and move his troops onto a bunch of very big bases. “By and large,” concluded Francis West, a counterinsurgency expert and Vietnam veteran who studied American military operations in Iraq, “the battalions continued to do what they knew best: conduct sweeps and mounted patrols during the day and targeted raids by night.”
Many units simply did not follow Casey’s lead. If Sanchez’s time in Iraq was colored by the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004, the Casey phase would be characterized by two outrages committed by American forces. The first was the Haditha massacre of November 19, 2005. This killing of a score of Iraqi civilians by Marines lashing out after being bombed showed the essential bankruptcy of the way the Americans were fighting the war: You cannot protect people by killing them.
A second incident, a few months later, demonstrated even more clearly the basic failure of the American approach in Iraq. In March 2006, in what would come to be known as the Black Hearts incident, a group of four soldiers from 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, got drunk in their outpost a few miles southwest of Baghdad, then went to a nearby house and gang-raped and killed a fourteen-year-old girl and murdered her parents and her six-year-old sister. After this they walked back to their outpost, where some slept while others grilled chicken wings. An investigation by journalist Jim Frederick provided overwhelming evidence that, while the unit was poorly led, the fundamental problem was that the unit was badly overstretched, with squads coming in from one mission and immediately going out on another, for days at a time. “There was no downtime,” said one soldier. Squads were doing the jobs of platoons, platoons of companies, companies of battalions. One squad in particular felt strained, in part because of poisonous relationships in its chain of command, most notably with its company commander and his battalion commander, who was fond of telling captains that they were “shitbags” who constantly “fucked up.” The captains often told him they needed more men, and he would respond that they simply needed to operate more effectively. Bravo Company’s commander, in turn, felt he had to stay on the radio in his command post around the clock, catnapping in his chair under a poncho when he could.
In a representative moment, Lt. Col. Tom Kunk, the battalion commander, chewed out Sgt. Daniel Carrick for nearly being killed while on a patrol to search for roadside bombs. “You are getting blown up because you are not following the proper procedures,” he told Carrick and other soldiers. “What the fuck happened to you today? What the fuck were you doing? Probably just walking down the fucking street not paying attention.”
Carrick resented the charge that he was careless. He actually had approached the bomb because the specialized Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit would not come to detonate it unless he could get additional visual confirmation. “I did everything by the book. EOD told me to get closer.”
“Bullshit,” Kunk said. “You were not following the proper tactics, the proper methods.”
“Fuck you, sir,” the sergeant told the lieutenant colonel, and walked away.
Gen. Cushman, who had clashed with Gen. DePuy decades earlier, read about the Black Hearts war crime and was horrified. He sat down to explore in writing his growing feeling that American generals in Iraq were not doing their jobs. The powerful essay that resulted circulated at West Point and elsewhere in the Army. In it, Cushman faulted the chain of command above the battalion for not being aware earlier of the months-long deterioration in Bravo Company. Here, as with Abu Ghraib, he argued, there was a problem of generals not knowing what was going on in a troubled unit when it was their responsibility—and they had the means—to do so. Here, as with Abu Ghraib, he argued, there was a problem of “general officer command responsibility,” of commanders burdening units with more tasks than it was possible for them to do, of not understanding what was happening in the field. The issue was personal for Cushman: The Army in Iraq was not just part of the Army he had helped rebuild; the “Black Hearts” battalion was part of the same brigade of the 101st Airborne that he had commanded four decades earlier in Vietnam, during the Tet Offensive.
Torn and confused, trying to change course while under assault by a sophisticated group of enemies who adapted constantly, the American military under Casey did not make progress in Iraq. In 2004, it recorded 26,496 insurgent attacks. In 2005, that number increased to 34,131. Casey hopefully announced that 2006 would be “the Year of the Police,” but it turned
out to be the year of bitter urban fighting as Baghdad was consumed by a small-scale civil war. Fighting intensified in July 2006, especially in and around the capital. Every day that summer, there were fifty insurgent attacks just in Anbar Province, west of the capital. By the end of the summer, Baghdad had been largely ethnically cleansed, with Sunnis reduced to a few embattled enclaves on its western side. Insurgents were detonating about a thousand roadside bombs a week. An estimated two million Iraqis had fled the country, most of them Sunni, and an equal number were classified as internally displaced.
Casey and those around him did not seem to grasp how quickly the situation was deteriorating. Adm. William Fallon, the American military commander for the Pacific, visited Baghdad in midsummer and then, when back home, telephoned retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, an influential figure behind the scenes in Washington. “Jack, I just came out of Iraq,” Fallon began. “Could you help me to understand what the fuck is going on? . . . Casey is up to his ears in quicksand and he doesn’t even know it. This thing is going down around him.” The following year, Fallon would be reassigned to run Central Command, overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he was forced by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to step down early in 2008, after making disparaging comments to a journalist about Bush Administration policy in the Middle East.
Casey’s lack of awareness began to undercut his support at the top of the Bush Administration. He did not seem to realize that by the late summer of 2006 he was losing not only Baghdad but also the support of the White House. “I didn’t see that at the time,” he confessed in a subsequent interview. On August 17, in a briefing to top national security officials through a video link, he said he wanted to stick with his plan to turn over Baghdad to Iraqi security forces by the end of the year. Vice President Cheney, watching from Wyoming, was troubled by that comment. “I respected General Casey, but I couldn’t see a basis for his optimism,” Cheney wrote later.
In the wake of that briefing, the vice president began poking around for a different strategy—and different generals to lead it. Among those he would meet with was Col. H. R. McMaster, the author of Dereliction of Duty, about the failures of top American generals in Vietnam. The colonel told Cheney that the U.S. government should abandon the view, held by Casey, that the American goal was to turn over control to Iraqis as soon as possible.
In the first week of October 2006, some twenty-four American service members were killed in Iraq, and nearly three hundred more were wounded. Bush had tended to be “upbeat” in his frequent video teleconferences with commanders in Iraq, but in November, Casey would recall, that changed, and “the president was noticeably cold.” Casey was being relieved but did not quite recognize it, because it was happening in slow motion. In December he was told to leave Iraq within a few weeks rather than in the spring of 2007, as he had planned. “I left not really understanding what the hell had happened,” Casey said.
Ultimately, Casey’s record in Iraq was mixed. He did not succeed, but he probably deserves more credit than he has been given. In this way he resembles Gen. Walton Walker in Korea, doggedly fighting but skating near relief without realizing it. It is the fate of some generals simply to stave off defeat. Both Walker and Casey held on long enough in their wars for their successors to be able to act quickly and reap much credit in the process.
CHAPTER 30
David Petraeus
An outlier moves in, then leaves
If George Casey was the Walton Walker of the Iraq war, Gen. David Petraeus would be its Matthew Ridgway, arriving and soberly reassessing the situation and then, through clear thinking and impressive willpower, as well as taking advantage of changes on the ground, putting a new face on it.
Behind him, and enabling him to act, was a major improvement in civil-military discourse. The American position in Iraq began to improve only after President Bush turned away from Casey and his other senior generals and sought the advice of others, asking some hard questions that had been deflected for years. Taken aback by the setbacks suffered by Republican candidates in the midterm elections of 2006, President Bush asked outside experts to come to the White House. It is significant that at his meeting with several strategic thinkers on December 11, 2006, one of the major subjects was accountability and generalship. It is not enough that your generals are good men, advised Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University; they also must be competent commanders. “Not a single general has been removed for ineffectiveness during the course of this war,” Cohen gently scolded Bush.
The foremost result of that December meeting was that Gen. Petraeus would be selected to replace Casey as the new American commander in Iraq. It is significant that Petraeus was suggested by outsiders and picked by the president. He expressly was not the choice of the military. He was regarded by many of his peers as something of a thrice-cursed outlier—an officer with a doctorate from Princeton who also seemed to enjoy talking to reporters and even to politicians and who had made his peers look bad with his success leading the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul in 2003–4.
Together with Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, Petraeus revamped the American approach in Iraq, taking more risks, moving more aggressively, and, despite suffering an increase in casualties, radically improving the morale of American troops. Petraeus and Odierno also brought in like-minded officers, such as Lt. Gen. James Dubik, another outlying intellectual the Army seemed puzzled by. The common trait in all these officers was the ability to think critically, enabling them to arrive at new solutions when their Army training proved insufficient. Like other successful post-9/11 generals, such as Martin Dempsey (who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011) and James Mattis (who became chief of Central Command in 2010), these were not officers who fit the relentlessly tactical mode developed by DePuy but rather men who had, on their own, found the alternative mode supported by Gen. Cushman in the 1970s and ’80s: flexible commanders able to think independently. It is typical of Dubik that, upon retiring a few years later, he decided to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.
Petraeus and Odierno reversed some of Casey’s directives. They ordered their troops off the big bases where Casey had consolidated them and organized scores of small outposts, “patrol bases,” where groups of perhaps thirty-five to seventy-five soldiers would live near and even among the Iraqi people. They also told subordinates that it was not just acceptable but necessary to begin negotiating with insurgent groups. The biggest change was the hardest to see: They formally demoted “transitioning” to Iraqi security forces from the top American priority to number seven on their mission list. Replacing it as the number-one task was the mission of protecting the Iraqi people.
Equally significantly, Petraeus worked to repair the civil-military relationship at his level. He and the new American ambassador, Ryan Crocker, made it clear that they would work relentlessly closely and expected the same “unity of effort” from their subordinates.
Casey was in the dark about the coming changes. He learned only belatedly that retired Gen. Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, had been bypassing the chain of command and communicating directly with Odierno, a former subordinate of his, and even carrying messages between the White House and Odierno, as well as to Petraeus. Not long after returning to the United States, Casey—kicked upstairs to Army chief of staff, as Westmoreland had been during the Vietnam War—ran into Keane at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and angrily braced him. “We feel—the Chiefs feel—you are way too out in front in advocating a policy for which you are not accountable,” Casey said. “We’re accountable. You’re not accountable. And that’s a problem.” Asked about this in an interview, Casey confirmed the exchange, saying, “I always felt that as a professional military officer if he felt that he had something he thought that he could offer to the mission he ought to have called me or sent it to me or contacted me in some way. And he never did.” Casey’s reasoning was dead wrong. Keane w
as in fact injecting accountability into the system. He was repairing civil-military discourse by helping civilians ask tough questions about the conduct of the war. Keane’s intervention might superficially resemble the role played by Maxwell Taylor in the early 1960s, but actually it was radically different. Both retired generals alienated the Joint Chiefs of Staff of their time. But Taylor’s actions diminished the quality of civil-military interactions, while Keane’s improved them.
Unlike Ridgway, Petraeus already had served in the war he would transform, with two previous tours in Iraq, the first as commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, in 2003–4. It had not been inevitable that Mosul and the rest of the north would be relatively quiet. Some intelligence analysts had predicted that it would likely be one of the more violent parts of the country, because over 100,000 former Iraqi officers and soldiers lived there, including more than 1,000 retired generals. Nearby were 20,000 Kurdish militiamen, backing conflicting claims to various parts of the region. The city contained so many opponents of the American occupation that Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, chose to hide there. Yet on Petraeus’s watch, Mosul and the surrounding area remained relatively calm. This was in part because Petraeus, operating so far from Baghdad and under the uncertain command of Ricardo Sanchez, was able to run his own operation with his own policies. For example, he was notably more forgiving of former Baathists than was official American policy. As he said in 2004, when he had all but split from Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials, “It is not possible to fire all former Baathists and expect them to become anything other than enemies.”
In many ways, Petraeus in Iraq in 2007 was running higher risks than Ridgway had when he took command in Korea at the end of 1950. Unlike Ridgway, Petraeus did not have the military establishment backing his new direction. Rather, it is striking how many senior officials opposed the changes he and Odierno proposed to make: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of staff of the Army, and the head of Central Command all spoke out against the new course. (Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would be ousted by Defense Secretary Gates in mid-2007, having served just two years in the job, half the normal tenure.) There also was opposition in Congress to Petraeus’s changes, although that was not expressed with any kind of determination.
The Generals Page 41
