by Peter Baker
Rice noticed what she thought was profound pain on his face. The war was eating him up inside. She backed off.
Rice was not alone in her skepticism. The same day, Rumsfeld, still a caretaker until Robert Gates was sworn in, sent Bush and Cheney a proposal developed by senior Pentagon generals to “accelerate the transition”—exactly the opposite of where the president was heading. The plan built on the option Rumsfeld had presented in his memo the day before resigning, although the generals’ timetable was not as rapid. The number of American bases would be drawn down from fifty-five to thirty-seven by December 2007 and as few as twenty in 2008. Iraqis would assume control of security in all eighteen provinces by November 2007, and the American military mission would “formally conclude” by December 2007. “No increase in the level of U.S. forces can substitute for successful diplomacy in the region and in Iraq in getting the Iraqi Government to act,” the memo said.
With the military establishment opposed, Bush turned to a dissident faction that had been urging a more robust troop presence. That weekend, military scholars at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) led by Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point professor, conducted a multiday exercise to draft a plan to bolster American forces in Iraq, producing a forty-five-page paper urging that seven more army brigades and marine regiments be sent. General Jack Keane, the retired army vice chairman, then came to the White House on December 11 to make the case.
Keane was one of five military experts to brief Bush and Cheney that afternoon, replaying the Camp David summit, but this time the advocates for change were more determined to get through. Eliot Cohen, who had left Camp David in June kicking himself for not being blunter, did not hold back this time. Reprising arguments from his book Supreme Command, which the president had read, Cohen rebutted Bush’s Lyndon Johnson analogy, saying the failure in Vietnam was not micromanagement but a failure to force a serious strategic debate. And he argued, it was time to replace his commander.
“One of the biggest problems is leadership,” Cohen told Bush. “I have the greatest respect for General Casey but you need different leadership.”
Bush was already thinking about that. “So who would you put in?” he asked.
“Petraeus,” Cohen said.
Keane agreed, and he was equally direct. “Mr. President, to my mind, this is a major crisis,” he said. “Time is running out.” The solution, he argued, was a counterinsurgency approach aimed at protecting the population, which required more combat units.
But two other retired generals at the meeting, Barry McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, opposed more troops. “This is a fool’s errand,” McCaffrey said. Downing advocated a more aggressive use of special operations forces. Stephen Biddle, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, went last and largely sided with Keane.
Biddle was struck by how grim the whole affair was, funereal even. While the experts talked, a phalanx of White House aides lined up behind them like a silent Greek chorus. Bush, he thought, seemed on the verge of clinical depression. “It was clear that Bush thought he was looking at a war he was about to go on the historical record as losing,” Biddle recalled later. “He was clearly not happy. Everything suggested weight. His body looked like it felt heavy to him. He didn’t smile. The tone was very somber. No joking around. No light-hearted anything.”
Afterward, Keane and Kagan gave a private briefing to Cheney, outlining how a surge could work. They had a receptive audience. With his old friend Rumsfeld all but out the door, Cheney was becoming less inhibited about supporting a change in strategy, but he would not be the front man. That would be Keane, who was leading a revolt against the military hierarchy. The retired general had been drumming up support inside the administration and working clandestinely with officers who agreed with him, bypassing George Casey to consult with his deputy, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, who wanted more forces. Meghan O’Sullivan likewise had been quietly consulting with David Petraeus, everyone’s choice to succeed Casey. Keane’s maneuvering was driving the military hierarchy crazy. “How is it that Jack Keane’s getting in to see the vice president and we’re not?” General Peter J. Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, complained to a fellow four-star officer. John Abizaid was equally aggravated. “I guess you have to resign from the military and go work for AEI if you are going to give military advice to the president,” he told visiting civilians in Iraq.
Keane’s support was critical not because it drove the internal process but because it gave space for Bush to make the strategy change he was already inclined to make. If Bush overrode his commanders and Joint Chiefs, he had to have someone say this reflected good military judgment, not political second-guessing. He could hardly rebuff men with stars on their shoulders for the advice of thirtysomething aides like O’Sullivan with her Oxford doctorate and Brett McGurk with his Columbia law degree, neither of whom had served a day in uniform. “Keane is great as a validator,” Hadley said.
But Bush wanted to avoid a confrontation with military leaders if he could help it. He knew that if military leaders testified before Congress opposing the new strategy, what little political support he still had would vanish. “If senior generals had resigned in protest over the surge, that might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in Congress,” Karl Rove concluded. “Steve Hadley,” recalled William Luti, “kept saying that the surge policy should come from the military.” But Casey was “adamantly opposed” to adding more than two additional brigades and told Bush so by videoconference on December 12.
Isolated from his generals and even his closest adviser, Bush found support in an unlikely quarter. John McCain, a staunch supporter of the war and an equally strong critic of the way it was being run, sent Bush a private three-page letter the same day bluntly warning him that he would lose the war without more forces. McCain argued that the administration’s approach had it backward: instead of hoping a political settlement would reduce violence, the administration should establish security to create space for political reconciliation. McCain cited Kagan’s AEI study. “Without a basic level of security,” he wrote, “there will be no political solution, and our mission will fail.”
Dan Bartlett noticed how tense Bush was and proposed delaying the announcement of a new strategy.
The president looked relieved. Could they do that?
“We will fade it,” Bartlett said, meaning take the heat. “Don’t worry.”
Even as he was moving toward a troop surge, Bush was entertaining his own doubts. At Henry Kissinger’s suggestion, he had been reading A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne’s history of the war in Algeria, and the lesson he took away was that more people actually died after the French withdrew. But when it came to Iraq, perhaps the cause was hopeless. Perhaps Rice was right, and he would be throwing more lives away in a losing cause. On separate occasions, he asked both Hadley and O’Sullivan if the war was lost and hope was gone.
“Hadley, do you think the surge can succeed?” he asked one day.
“Mr. President, I do,” Hadley replied.
“Well, that is good,” Bush said. “Because if you ever think it can’t, you come and tell me. Because as long as we think we can succeed, I am in. But if we ever think we cannot succeed, I can’t look the mothers of our men and women in uniform in the eye and keep sending them into battle.”
30
“Everybody knew this was the last bullet in the chamber”
As their motorcade crossed the Potomac River, President Bush and Vice President Cheney were on the same page. Increasingly convinced of the need for a surge and strategy change, Bush was determined to bring along the generals, and he needed Cheney to play his wingman.
The two were headed to the Pentagon to meet with the top officers in their supersecret conference center known as the Tank on December 13, going to their turf to show respect. Sitting in the car on the way, Bush and Cheney agreed to a good-cop, bad-cop routine, with the vice president asking tough, pointed questions, while the president held
back to avoid chilling the discussion. “The president didn’t want to come in with a point of view where the chiefs would say, well, he has already made up his mind,” J. D. Crouch remembered. As Dan Bartlett put it, “Cheney was supposed to be the heavy.”
General Peter Pace opened the discussion with recommendations from the chiefs to shift to a more advisory and training role, in effect accelerating the current transition strategy.
“The question is when do you shift to advising,” the president said. “You don’t want to do it too early.”
Pace suggested Iraqi troops would be up to the test. “We need to get the Iraqi Security Forces in charge,” he said.
As planned, Cheney jumped in, uncharacteristically engaging in debate in front of a group. “We’re betting the farm on Iraqi Security Forces,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better to make a major push with our forces to get it done?” He offered a grim picture of a destabilizing region if America lost in Iraq. “Suddenly it will be very dangerous to be a friend of the United States. There’s an awful lot riding on this.”
The case against the surge was made by General Peter Schoomaker, who came of age as part of the daring but failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1980 and then became part of the new special operations forces created in the aftermath, serving in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Haiti. He had been lured back from retirement in 2003, in part by Cheney, to take over from Eric Shinseki as army chief of staff and had presided over long, multiple deployments that taxed his troops. As with the other chiefs, his statutory responsibility was the health of the force rather than any operational involvement in Iraq.
Schoomaker argued a surge would not bring down violence, noting that there had been several temporary troop buildups over the years, usually in advance of Iraqi elections in anticipation of possible trouble, without changing the overall arc of violence. In what Bush took to be a reference to the new Democratic Congress, the general seemed to suggest the political system would not tolerate a months-long buildup.
“I don’t think that you have the time to surge and generate enough forces for this thing to continue to go,” Schoomaker told the president.
“I am the president,” Bush shot back. “And I’ve got the time.”
Schoomaker’s job was to provide military counsel. “Thanks very much for the political advice,” Bush said sharply, “but I will take care of the politics. That is my job.”
Undeterred, Schoomaker said a surge of five brigades would actually affect fifteen brigades—five in Iraq whose tours would have to be extended, another five whose rotation would have to be accelerated to increase the number of troops in the theater, and another five to move up the queue to backfill. “My concerns were practical ones of force generation and sustainment at that particular point in time,” he recalled later.
To Bush, he put it bluntly. “We’re concerned we’re going to break the army,” the general said.
Bush, who was supposed to let Cheney do the debating, could not help himself. He leaned forward. “Let me tell you what’s going to break the army,” he said. “What’s going to break the army is a defeat like we had in Vietnam that broke the army for a generation.”
The generals took the point. But they worried that committing everything to Iraq would leave little in case of a flare-up elsewhere in the world.
Again, Bush turned the argument around: better to fight the war America was already in than worry about a war that had not actually happened.
To take the sting out of the encounter, Bush told the generals that he planned to increase the overall size of the armed forces, which should alleviate the pressure, and send more civilians to Iraq, a longtime sore point for the military. But the generals walked out unconvinced. Indeed, Schoomaker took his dissent public the next day, December 14, during testimony before a congressionally chartered commission, warning that “we will break” the military with the current pace of war-zone rotations. Afterward, he told reporters that “we should not surge without a purpose and that purpose should be measurable and get us something.”
Two days after the Tank meeting, Bush and Cheney returned to the Pentagon for a full honor review marking Rumsfeld’s departure. Bush was gracious, but Cheney heaped praise on his former boss in a way that seemed to hint at loss. Rumsfeld, he said, was “a man of rectitude” and “the very ideal of a public servant,” a man who “emanates loyalty, integrity, and above all love for this country and a devotion to its cause.” In a comment some took as a subtle rebuke of Bush’s decision to oust Rumsfeld, Cheney concluded, “I believe the record speaks for itself: Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had.”
To win over the Joint Chiefs, Bush decided to publicly signal his willingness to expand the overall size of the military. On December 19, he summoned reporters from the Washington Post to the Oval Office to announce that he would support a force increase. “We need to reset our military,” he told them. “There’s no question the military has been used a lot.” The move was a significant reversal after years of denying the need for more men and women in uniform. When John Kerry proposed adding forty thousand to the armed forces during the 2004 campaign, the Bush administration had dismissed him. As late as June 2006, the administration argued that better technology and tactics meant no additional capacity was needed. But now Bush authorized Robert Gates to explore adding seventy thousand soldiers and marines.
As he sat with the reporters in the Oval Office that day, Bush hinted that a surge was on the way, arguing that the midterm election was a mandate not to leave Iraq but to find a way to succeed. Still, he was ready to concede for the first time what everyone else had for a while: the war effort was failing. Just two months after declaring that “absolutely, we’re winning” in Iraq, Bush adopted a formulation Peter Pace had used at a congressional hearing. “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush said. Asked about his previous statement, Bush recast it as a prediction, not an assessment. “Yes, that was an indication of my belief that we’re going to win,” he said.
Robert Gates had just been sworn in as defense secretary, and John Abizaid announced his retirement. George Casey would be on the way out soon too, with David Petraeus on track to be his successor. Within weeks, the president who had boasted of deferring to the military had swept aside the leaders of the war effort. As with Rumsfeld, Bush chose not to blame Abizaid or Casey. He offered Abizaid the position of national intelligence director, only to be turned down. As for Casey, Bush told Gates to take care of him. He would soon be named army chief of staff.
Casey was still fighting the surge, certain that it was a mistake. Recognizing that Bush was determined to add troops, Casey recommended just two brigades be sent, with a third stationed in Kuwait in case it was needed and two others kept on deck in the United States. He convinced Gates when the new defense secretary made his first trip to Iraq since taking office. On the flight back, Gates worked on a recommendation for two brigades. “Our commanders do not want more additional force than these approximately 10,000,” he wrote in talking points for a meeting with Bush. “It would be difficult to resource a more aggressive U.S. approach due to the stresses and the strains on the force,” and forcing more on a reluctant Iraqi government “would undermine much of what we have accomplished over the past two years.”
When Jack Keane heard about the mini-surge plan, he was alarmed and alerted John Hannah, the vice president’s national security adviser. Meghan O’Sullivan was equally disturbed and reached out to Petraeus to see if he thought he could do what needed to be done with two brigades; Petraeus made clear he needed as much force as she could deliver. Petraeus, although still not publicly announced to take over in Iraq, called Pace to protest. “Look, Chairman, this is sort of awkward, but I can’t go over there if it’s two plus three,” he said. “Don’t bother. You might want to think about a different commander.”
Bush headed to Crawford for Christmas, then invited the national security team to come down for a critical
meeting on Iraq. Condoleezza Rice arrived the afternoon of December 27, a day early, to visit alone with the president. She found him on the porch of the ranch house and sat down to talk.
She had come to terms with what she knew would be Bush’s decision and even convinced herself to support it after calling Ray Odierno in Baghdad and listening to him describe how the extra troops would be married to strategy changes.
“You’re going to do it, and it’s the right thing to do,” she told Bush. “I’m there and I’ll do everything I can to support it. But, Mr. President, this is your last card. It had better work.”
She got up and walked away.
The next day, the rest of the team arrived. Gates presented the two-brigade mini-surge option advanced by Casey, but Bush shut it down quickly.
“No, I am going to commit five brigades,” he said. “If I go to the American people and say I am going to commit two and then more if I need it, what I am really telling them is I don’t know what I am doing.”
What’s more, making the deployment of each additional brigade a separate decision would make each one “another Washington Post debate,” reopening the fight again and again, as J. D. Crouch put it. If Bush was going to take the heat for an unpopular decision, better to do it all at once. He also decided to send a couple of battalions of marines to Anbar Province, where Sunni leaders alienated by al-Qaeda were beginning to switch sides. Hadley and Crouch had argued for the Anbar deployment as well as reinforcements for Baghdad on the theory that it would be a powerful statement to take back an area deemed lost to the enemy.
So there was a plan. It had taken months, while more blood was spilled. But Bush and Cheney believed they had a chance to turn the situation around. And none too soon. The year ended with two macabre milestones out of Iraq. On December 30, Saddam Hussein was executed in a chaotic scene captured on cell phone video, with Iraqis in the room taunting him in his last moments of life. “Go to hell,” one yelled, while others chanted the name of Moqtada al-Sadr before Hussein’s neck was snapped by a hangman’s noose. A day later, New Year’s Eve, the American casualty toll hit three thousand.
