Nouri al-Maliki served as Iraq’s prime minister for eight years—a remarkable run in the rough-and-tumble of Iraqi politics. The members of the ruling group that included Talabani, Hashemi, and Mahdi (a surrogate for Hakim) disliked Maliki and tried on more than one occasion to get rid of him. Of course, they wanted us to do it for them. Our response was that they had elected him—now they would have to work together.
Most of the focus was on trying to pass a budget and an oil law; build security forces; purge the police of sectarian elements; and deliver essential services like electricity to the population. The U.S. Congress even insisted on a set of benchmarks for governing in exchange for the substantial assistance that Iraq was receiving. The Iraqis resented the notion of being graded on their performance, a point we tried to make to the Congress. But we dutifully reported on how Baghdad was doing. There seemed to be little recognition of how hard it was to make new institutions actually work. To their credit, the Iraqis were trying to use their democratic processes—passing legislation rather than ruling by decree. In such a divided country, this was a very hard task indeed.
“Pretty Soon You Will All Be Swinging from Lampposts”
The governance problem was exacerbated by the horrible security situation. Revenge killings were occurring almost daily as sectarian violence worsened considerably throughout 2006. It was a period of nearly full-scale civil war as neighborhoods and communities were being cleansed on a sectarian basis. Visiting Baghdad again late in 2006, I asked to meet with Sunni leaders—including some tribesmen—and then separately with Shia.
Before I could say a word, the Sunnis handed me grotesque pictures of children with severed heads and limbs. I think it was meant to shock me, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time I had seen photographic evidence of atrocities. “Let me tell you something,” I said to them. “We have a saying in the United States. We can hang separately or we can hang together.” I paused and let the interpreter say the phrase a couple of times. “Do they understand?” I asked.
He nodded. “Well, you can stick together or the next time I come you’ll all be swinging from lampposts.”
“Did they get that?” I asked.
“You bet,” he answered.
About an hour later, the next group made the same photographic presentation—but this time the victims were Shia. I wanted to make the point that turning on each other was not the answer. Either they had to pull together to solve their problems or they would be devoured by the chaos.
The morning after returning to Washington, I went to see the president and told him about all that had happened. “I’m not sure they are going to make it,” I said. He could see that I was pretty despondent and really tired. “Well, what should we do?” he asked. Throughout my time with him, I had tried not to dump a problem in his lap with no answer. But this time I had nothing to say. “Let me go and think about it, sir.” It was the low point for me—professionally and personally.
Another Chance to Govern: The Violence Begins to Subside
Late in 2006, intelligence reports continued to be bleak, yet we now know that things were starting to turn slowly in favor of a more stable Iraq. John Taylor, a colleague from Stanford who had been undersecretary of the Treasury in the first term, called me one morning. “My son is serving in Anbar and he has sent a note that I think you ought to see,” he said. John sent a copy of the e-mail to my executive assistant, who passed it on to me. It was a revelation. The young Marine talked about how cooperation with the tribes was improving. Our soldiers were being treated well by the tribesmen and their families, he reported. The insurgents were losing ground.
Indeed, a few months earlier, I had received news on June 7 that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed in a U.S. airstrike. He had been the mastermind of al-Qaeda in Iraq and had orchestrated the February bombing of the Golden Mosque. He hoped to plunge the country into civil war, and he had succeeded. I have reflected on how I became hardened enough to celebrate the demise of another human being with absolutely no remorse. Today, a gruesome souvenir occupies a treasured space on my bookcase. The unit that killed Zarqawi gave me a stone from the house where he met his demise. The gray-and-black piece of slab has jagged edges—clearly the result of an explosion. It says simply AMZ: 6-7-2006.
And on the ground in Anbar, just as John’s son had predicted, we began to get reports of offers from the tribes to cooperate with us. Apparently, Zarqawi’s fighters were very bad guests—compelling cooperation through brutal tactics, delivering the severed heads of children to their parents, and marrying their daughters off to al-Qaeda fighters. Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was even more demanding and escalated these practices. The sheikhs had eventually had enough. They might not have liked us, but we were, at least for the time being, the lesser of two evils.
In time, though, the cooperation would become real and deeper. First, we finally created a mechanism for tribal engagement that worked. We dispatched teams of diplomats, aid workers, and security experts to live among the tribes and help them in matters of governance and reconstruction. These Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) gave us a structure for real engagement in the Sunni heartland.8 They didn’t have to come to Baghdad—we went to them.
On one occasion, an American diplomat, Jason P. Hyland, welcomed me to the PRT in Mosul. It was a fine example of what we were trying to do. In this case, Hyland had helped the Iraqis to form a town council made up of elected officials who met to resolve the city’s problems. The job was made difficult by its ethnic and sectarian mix. It was a majority Sunni Arab city with significant populations of Kurds and other minorities. After greeting the participants I said, “I’m here to listen and to help in any way that I can. I’ll report your views directly to the president.” Much to my amazement, the meeting wasn’t at all about what the United States could do. The Sunni sheikh, his deputy, and the ten or so members of the council were much more engaged in debating each other. That was a good sign. But you could see that they were struggling to be civil. The chairman in particular was trying to restrain himself as he listened to the deputy go on and on about Kurdish rights. But he did restrain himself. In fact, he asked each member of the council to speak, telling me that everyone had a right to an opinion. I’m not sure he really believed it—and I did wonder if that was his practice when I wasn’t in the room. Hyland assured me that it was always the case. They weren’t being civil just for show.
The situation was improving too, because the tribes organized to work with us to expel al-Qaeda from al-Anbar province. They were fierce fighters and with training and American airpower turned out to be a formidable force.
Still, the tide was not turning quickly enough and levels of violence remained unacceptably high. The big problem was in the central part of the country, where the population was a mix of Sunni and Shia. The military used to say that 80 percent of sectarian violence in Iraq occurred within thirty miles of Baghdad. The south of the country was relatively free of that kind of violence because it was almost all Shia, but it was nevertheless extremely dangerous for our soldiers. Tehran was helping radical Shia militias—including those of Muqtada al-Sadr—to kill our troops. Too many Americans were dying. Too many Iraqis were dying.
Each morning I opened the Washington Post to “Faces of the Fallen.” The Post had begun the series in 2003 to memorialize Americans killed in the war. I made myself look at every one of the photos—a harsh reminder of the costs of the war. All of our top national security officials met with Gold Star families and visited Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospital.
I tried to visit wounded soldiers at least a few times each year. On Good Friday, I would go to noon services and then in the afternoon go to one of the hospitals. During one visit, the doctor accompanying me asked if I would visit a particular patient’s mother who wanted to meet me. “Of course,” I said. He told me that it would be rough going. The young man—an African American in his midtwenties—had sustained a brain injury and cried out un
controllably. “Be prepared,” the doctor said. I opened the door and entered the room. His mom came over. All that I could say was, “I’m so sorry for your sacrifice and I’m praying for your family.” She thanked me for coming and asked if we could take a picture. “He’ll be all right,” she said. I knew that he probably wouldn’t be. At times like that, no goal, no matter how worthy, seemed worth the sacrifice. But I had to hope—and still do—that one day a stable, secure, and democratic Iraq would honor soldiers like that young man.
The Iraqis were taking huge losses fighting the insurgency too. Sitting in my office one day, Steve Hadley said something really profound. “The Iraqis have to win their freedom,” he said. “We can’t do it for them.” By 2006, the Iraqis were doing just that—with their own blood, not just that of Americans. They had a very good defense minister who was making progress in training the army, particularly the special forces. But they were overmatched and we didn’t have the strategy or the numbers to help them.
Pete Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked to see me one afternoon. He was a Marine—the first to be chairman. Pete was a soldier, not a Washington bureaucrat. “I’ve been thinking,” he began. “If the number of trained Iraqi troops is increasing and we’re making progress—why is the security situation getting worse?” Pete said that he had quietly (meaning without Don’s permission) asked a group of colonels to take a fresh look at our strategy in Iraq. I wanted to jump up and hug him.
For three years, I had listened to the Pentagon brief the president, using largely useless metrics, like ammunition dumps destroyed and a version of a “body count”—how many terrorists had been killed. I kept thinking back to Vietnam where metrics like these had given Lyndon Johnson a false sense that the United States was winning the war.
And I had listened with growing concern and anger as the State Department was blamed for not finding a political solution. In one session, the U.S. commander in Iraq, George Casey, asked for more civilian personnel. “The State Department needs to bring me as many civilians as possible,” he said to the president.
I don’t know why, but I snapped. “General, when you can protect them, I’ll send them,” I barked. The room fell silent.
Later, after the meeting, Steve Hadley called me and asked me to talk to George. “You embarrassed him in front of the president,” he said.
“Yes, I know. I will call him because he’s a good man. But I meant what I said, Steve. And I won’t take it back.”
We were all coming to terms with our failing strategy. The security situation, the Pentagon would say, would improve when the political situation improved. Steve put it best. “Sometimes a security problem is just a security problem,” he told the president.
All In
In November 2006, President Bush decided that it was time to change direction. He asked Don Rumsfeld to step down as secretary and brought Bob Gates to head the Pentagon. George Casey returned to Washington, and David Petraeus deployed to Baghdad to head the military effort. Though John Negroponte and Zal had been excellent ambassadors, we decided to bring in fresh legs in Baghdad. Ryan Crocker, one of the best officers in the Foreign Service and our ambassador to Pakistan—one of the toughest posts in the world—headed to Iraq.
But change in personnel was not enough—we needed a change in strategy too. The generals who had fought in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown—Petraeus, Pete Chiarelli, Ray Odierno—returned to Washington in 2004 with a chance to reassess what they had done. The military is very good at exercises in “lessons learned.” These generals and Pete Pace’s group of colonels, which included H. R. McMaster, developed a new approach. In order to help with the Iraqis, you had to live with them, train with them, and fight with them. It was dangerous work and it took many more people than we had on the ground. Together with aid workers and diplomats deployed in the PRTs, American soldiers went right into the heart of the fight.
The president’s new policy became known as “the surge.” It was a gut-wrenching decision for him—and frankly for all who advised him. I was really skeptical at the start, believing that we might achieve little and yet lose more American lives. When the NSC met on December 8, 2006, to consider the policy, the president and I argued publicly in an NSC meeting—the first time we had ever done so.
“Mr. President, if you send more troops in and don’t change what we are doing, we will just have more people killed. And if the Iraqis keep up their sectarian ways, nothing will work.”
“So what’s your plan, Condi?” the president asked. “We’ll just let them kill each other, and we’ll stand by and try to pick up the pieces?”
“No, Mr. President,” I said. “We just can’t win by putting our forces in the middle of their blood feud. If they want to have a civil war, we’re going to have to let them.”
I was furious. But he was the president and I wasn’t going to argue further with others in the room. After the meeting, I followed him into the Oval Office. “You know I’ve been all in. No one has supported this war and worked harder than I have,” I said—the how dare you unsaid but clearly meant.
“I know,” he said quietly. I felt so awful at that moment. This war was “his” war, and he was not prepared as president to lose it and repeat America’s tragic retreat after Vietnam. I started to see that he believed surging U.S. forces was his best chance to avoid Johnson’s fate.
The personnel changes that the president had made reassured me that we might succeed. Bob Gates and I were friends. We had gone through the extraordinary events of the end of the Cold War together while serving on George H. W. Bush’s NSC. There were few people I trusted more. And David Petraeus was one of the best minds in the American military. We had dinner together one night at the Watergate. “I tried to have this conversation back in 2003 when you were national security adviser,” he said. I didn’t understand what he meant. “Don Rumsfeld canceled the meeting,” he explained. He went on to talk about how much we needed close cooperation between civilians and the military if we were to succeed.
And I had done one other thing: I stepped outside of channels and called General Ray Odierno, who was now commanding our forces in Anbar. Ray, a giant of a man with a shaved head and a tough persona, had been my Joint Chiefs liaison in my first two years as secretary. He had helped me develop the Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
“Ray,” I said, “you and I are not having this conversation. But tell me. Will the surge do as advertised?”
“It is our best chance. And I think it will work,” he answered. That was enough for me.
At the very end of 2006, the national security team was at the president’s Crawford ranch for a series of meetings to review Iraq. A couple of hours before dinner, I saw the president standing at the fishing pond near the end of the property. The sun was setting on an unusually warm day, and at first I thought, I should just leave him alone. But something told me to go ahead and join him. He was looking out over the plains and motioned for me to come on down. “Can you support me on this?” He didn’t need to fill in the antecedent. “I can,” I said. “But you know that this is our last card.”
The president had done his homework on whether the Iraqis were really prepared to win their own peace. This time there could be no excuses—no blaming America for every shortcoming, and no blaming each other. Before he made the decision to surge forces, the president met with Maliki in Amman, Jordan, in November 2006. The Iraqi prime minister was well prepared. He had a military plan of action—a fairly sophisticated briefing—that he handed over to the president. The problem was that Maliki wanted to execute the plan himself, which is not a bad thing in its own right, but our commanders did not think the Iraqi military would be ready for such an operation for at least another year. President Bush knew the surge could not wait. He met privately with Maliki, and told him, “Let me lend you some of my forces.” We were all in.
Histories will be written for years to come about the surge and its success. Anbar was taken back from al
-Qaeda, the black flag of the terrorists torn down by local tribesmen as they chased them from town after town. Most important, sectarian violence in and around Baghdad and in the center of the country declined dramatically and tailed off over time. Al-Qaeda in Iraq continued its attacks but at a level that did not threaten the government. And in the south of the country, with more American forces on the ground, the Iranians faced a tougher task.
We had told the Iranians that we knew they were providing the weapons and the training that were killing our soldiers. The Russians carried the message for us. “We won’t cross the border, but if we find your people in Iraq, we will capture or kill them.” In a stroke of good fortune, we caught the deputy commander of the Quds force inside Iraqi territory. He was taken to Irbil and questioned. We told the Iranians that he was “singing like a bird” about everything they were doing and exposing their operations. They were less active after that.
Maliki proved to be an able commander in chief during this period. At one point, in March 2008, he ordered Iraqi security forces to take back the refinery in Basra from Iranian-backed Shia militias. American generals objected, telling him that his forces were not ready. Maliki launched the operation anyway. As we sat in the Situation Room at the White House, every one of us proclaimed the stupidity of the prime minister—everyone except President Bush. “He is showing that he is in charge. It is an important message to his people,” he said.
The president, a politician himself, understood what Maliki was trying to do. The Iraqi prime minister entered the liberated area on the back of an Iraqi tank. He was, for the moment, a symbol for his people—of what Iraq could achieve.
The improving security situation gave the Iraqis some breathing room to take on the other tasks of governing. Here the picture was decidedly mixed—but not without some successes.
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