A more seasoned presidential contender, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden—who had visited Iraq frequently—on the day before the hearings had preempted Senator Clinton’s dismissal of Petraeus’s testimony by assuring the country that Petraeus was “dead flat wrong.” The next day, during the actual proceedings, Senator Biden questioned the general’s statistics, provided his own anecdotes about the impossibility of traveling in Iraq, and tutored Petraeus on the senator’s own partition plan to set up contiguous independent Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni enclaves—a trisection proposal that he would soon push through the Senate on a nonbinding resolution that was to be largely forgotten as the violence subsided.7
The influential Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, while not a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had already gone further than any congressional critic of the war. In April 2007—five months before the hearings—Reid had proclaimed that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” Not much later, Reid, like others, once again questioned Petraeus’s optimism on the surge: “He’s made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual.” Meanwhile, outside the hearing, committee member and presidential candidate Senator Dodd scoffed that Petraeus was engaging in “happy talk.”8
The senatorial consensus was that General Petraeus was not telling the truth, even under oath—an appraisal shared by many liberal House members as well. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Lantos of California, blasted Petraeus and Crocker with more euphemisms for dishonesty: “We can no longer take their assertions on Iraq at face value.” Petraeus and the surge were a political hot potato as public opinion continued to swing sharply against the war. The general was in danger of being reduced to a partisan defender of an unpopular administration rather than a military officer trying to win a lost war for his country.
Some of the popular reaction was just as harsh about Petraeus himself. Perhaps the nadir came on the very first day of his testimony. On September 10, 2007, the New York Times ran a MoveOn.org ad—at a generous discount of less than half the normal advertising rate and contrary to its own policies of not accepting ad hominem ads—with the provocative headline GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US? The ad went on to suggest that the general was a liar and perhaps even traitorous: Petraeus was supposedly a commander “constantly at war with the facts,” in “an unwinnable religious civil war.” The ad further predicted that “Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.”
Few senators, and fewer even in the media, could appreciate that in fact the surge was already starting to bring some calm to Iraq, despite the increase in violence for the twelve-month period following mid-2006. Indeed, though 2007 would prove to be the costliest year since the start of the war in terms of lost American lives, combat fatalities nonetheless would be more than halved in 2008—and then halved again in 2009. Even more telling, by the time of the September congressional hearings, Iraq civilian deaths had, as Petraeus pointed out, already dramatically plummeted in just a year, from 3,389 in September 2006 to 752 in September 2007. These figures did not necessarily suggest that the insurgents were losing the struggle—only that the American military had a chance to gain more time to stabilize the country.
There was still no indication in September that in just a few weeks’ time, American casualties would abruptly drop to twenty-three dead in the month of December 2007. That would be the lowest monthly figure since early 2004, when the violence had erupted into open warfare. The more Petraeus attempted to convince Congress by his own preliminary data that the incipient surge was beginning to work in calming Iraq, the more his inquisitors ignored his testimony and played to the general public anger.9
The entire mood of the country—and well beyond America’s shores as well—had been polarized since before the war began, in a fashion not seen since the Vietnam War years or perhaps the pre–Civil War era. Michael Moore, the controversial documentary filmmaker, had seemingly wished for an insurgent victory—comparing the insurgents in Iraq to Americans’ revolutionary forefathers. Apparently, Moore envisioned American casualties as a sort of penance for our unwise and immoral involvement: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush? . . . I’m sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe—just maybe—God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.”
Even greater anger against the war had emerged in a variety of venues. A 2004 novel by Nicholson Baker, Checkpoint, contemplated the assassination of the wartime commander in chief George W. Bush—a topic again taken up in a later film shown at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, the International Critics Prize–winning “mockumentary,” Gabriel Range’s Death of a President. In a 2004 op-ed in the British Guardian, one Charles Brooker had wished out loud for a return of John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald (“Where are you when we need you?”). This global animus toward George W. Bush seemed to rub off on any civilian or military official who agreed that the controversial decision to go into Iraq did not necessarily need to end in the loss of the country to insurgency and an abject American withdrawal. Many officers privately no doubt objected to the strategic rationale of going into Iraq in the first place, but still felt that the only thing worse than fighting a poorly conceived war was losing it.10
But how exactly had a previously little-known and apolitical General David Petraeus ended up in this maelstrom of trying to save an orphaned war—one authorized by both houses of Congress, once supported by 70 percent of the American people, and just a few years earlier seen as the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s successful efforts to destroy the nexus between Middle East authoritarians and international terrorism?
From “Mission Accomplished” to Abject Nightmare (March 2003–December 2006)
There was a variety of reasons, some understandable and others less so, why the public welcomed this second, and clearly more controversial, post-9/11 war. As a practical matter, the prior Afghanistan intervention—begun eighteen months earlier, on October 7, 2001—had seemingly gone brilliantly, with 88 percent of the public voicing support even as experts warned that the country was “the graveyard of empires” and could never be kept free of the Taliban. Yet the last cadres of the ruling Taliban were expelled from most of the cities of Afghanistan by December 17, 2001, just nine weeks after the invasion—at a cost of only twelve American dead. By January, Afghan tribal elders were meeting in Europe to form a quasi-constitutional state. In 2001, the notion that Taliban diehards would still be killing Americans a decade later seemed remote.
The United Nations had sanctioned the occupation of Afghanistan. European members of NATO, as they had in the Korean War, pledged to send peacekeeping troops to oversee what appeared to be an amazingly abrupt transition from theocracy to some sort of democracy. If Afghanistan had been liberated in less than nine weeks, with a consensual government in place in four months, then Saddam’s Iraq—which the U.S. military had already defeated easily in 1991—in such a comparative calculus might be overrun in a three-or-four-week “cakewalk,” followed by an interim government within a year. At least that was the thinking among some of the more optimistic proponents of the war and perhaps the public at large.11
On October 11, 2002, the U.S. Congress approved, by wide margins in both houses, a joint resolution authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein. In some sense, this act was merely a restatement of a prior 1998 congressional authorization for “regime change” in Iraq, supported and signed by Bill Clinton. Apparently a majority in Congress felt that after twelve years of a cold war with Saddam Hussein, characterized by constant patrolling of Iraqi airspace, it was time to
confront the regime—especially given Saddam’s occasional support for terrorists of various sorts in a post–September 11 climate. At the time, many of America’s traditional allies—the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, and others—accepted that the American decision to force Saddam Hussein to comply with UN resolutions was the right one, even if the UN Security Council finally balked at authorizing a war to remove the Iraqi regime, and there were loud NATO dissenters such as France and Russia.12
The U.S. Congress accordingly cited twenty-three causes for war. Almost every writ imaginable was included in the resolution for the use of armed force. The congressional checklist ranged from Saddam’s genocidal practices (“by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region”) and his subsidies to terrorists of all stripes (“to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations”) to his trying to kill former president Bush and opposing the enforcement of UN resolutions (“attempting in 1993 to assassinate former president Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council”).13
Most of these congressional authorizations were strangely ignored by the Bush administration over the next five months, at least in a general debate over the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein. Instead, the administration would commit what turned out to be the most grievous error of its eight-year tenure, by focusing on only one theme of the wide-ranging twenty-three congressional proclamations: the danger of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Apparently administration planners thought that an existential danger might rally the public to war in a way that Saddam’s prior acts of genocide, attempts to kill a U.S. president, cash subsidies to Palestinian suicide bombers, or sanctuaries for wanted international terrorists would not. The result was that in the short term, most Americans believed that their government was moving to obliterate supposedly vast WMD stockpiles in Iraq.
The WMD argument was compelling, but the administration had in effect put all their eggs in one basket. The war was sold on an effort to strip Saddam of his WMD arsenal—a dubious proposition given the inadequate intelligence surrounding the closed Baathist police state. Despite a growing antiwar movement, and the failure to prove a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists, the public was convinced by the Bush administration’s insistence on the dangers of WMDs that the war was necessary. It also trusted that it would be no more difficult than had been the removal of the Taliban, with a consensual government rapidly installed in Saddam Hussein’s place. Worse still, when WMDs were not found as anticipated, the administration did not rely on the other writs of the congressional decrees, but instead post facto changed the reason for the war to a new emphasis not approved by Congress—namely, spreading freedom and liberty in the Middle East.
Nonetheless, the first few days of the Iraq War confirmed prewar confidence. Donald Rumsfeld’s successful strategy in Afghanistan of a “light footprint” was repeated once more against Saddam Hussein. Fewer than two hundred thousand American and coalition troops quickly marched into a country of 26 million from Kuwait, brushing aside most organized resistance. Saddam’s Baathist government was removed in less than three weeks (March 20–April 9) in an effective campaign that cost just 139 U.S. military personnel. “Shock and awe” pyrotechnics were supposed to have sent both the Iraqi military and civilian population into panic without causing substantial material damage that might impair postwar nation building.
Critics who had either predicted another Vietnam quagmire or argued for a half-million-man force comparable to that of Gulf War I at that initial point seemed to have been proven wrong. Numerous Iraqis appeared jubilant as they toppled Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad statue. Kurdistan was liberated amid a sea of pro-American euphoria. There were no mass disruptions on the Arab street. Nor did global Islamic terrorism spike. Iraq seemed relatively calm. Oil prices soon returned to normal levels. On May 1, 2003, George Bush gave a formal victory speech on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, declaring major combat operations over in Iraq—beneath an enormous banner triumphantly proclaiming MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The commander in chief had just won two wars in the Middle East, against the region’s most violent regimes, at the cost of only 151 American fatalities.14
Three soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (1/7), armed with M16A2 assault rifles, enter one of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces during the first weeks of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Photo by Lance Corporal Kevin C. Quihuis Jr., courtesy of the Department of Defense.
Almost immediately the initial rapture faded. The idea of “mission accomplished” proved premature and soon embarrassing. The expected large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize. That fact was especially awkward to the Bush administration because the rationale for war had not emphasized the majority of quite different congressional authorizations. Instead, enormous depots of conventional artillery shells and bombs were uncovered—and left unguarded—providing the enemy with the ingredients for thousands of future improvised explosive devices.
Saddam Hussein and his sons were nowhere to be found. Compounding the confusion, General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM (United States Central Command) commander in charge of the U.S. presence in the Middle East, who had overseen the invasion, abruptly announced his intention to retire on May 22, 2003. He gave the impression that he wished to leave Iraq before the unexpectedly escalating violence marred his swift victory over Saddam—and tarnished his postmilitary prospects in the private sector. By 2004, Franks had already published his memoirs. As the violence was heating up, he had written a wish list of regrets—a host of “I wish that’s”—followed by laments over the inability of the State Department and Pentagon to work together. The former general Franks in print regretted the lack of an international conference on rebuilding Iraq, the “melting away of the Iraqi army,” and so on—all without apparent recognition that his own retirement had added to the confusion amid an ongoing insurgency. More regrettably, General Franks, at a key moment when proven U.S. leadership was needed in Baghdad, had ordered the withdrawal of the Coalition Forces Land Component Commander (Lt. Gen. John Abizaid) and his headquarters from Iraq, and then compounded the error by ordering its replacement with the understaffed and poorly led Coalition Joint Task Force 7 (under the newly promoted Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez).
Meanwhile, the first American regent of Iraq, Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jay Garner, lasted in his position only a few weeks, after terrorism increased, lawlessness prevailed, and his calls for prompt Iraqi elections were determined to be unrealistic. Few later knew what to make of Garner’s brief tenure—whether he had been inept or carefully crafting plans that might have worked had he been given a fair opportunity and not undercut by infighting in the administration. What was increasingly apparent, however, was that a growing fight between Secretary of State Colin Powell’s State Department and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon over how postwar Iraq should be run would only escalate—and be played out quite publicly in the press.
By May 11, 2003, Paul Bremer was appointed the new proconsul, with vastly expanded powers. Bremer was a former managing director of Kissinger and Associates. His own background did not include Mideast expertise. His appointment and residence in the heavily guarded Green Zone enclave did little to dispel rumors of American neocolonial ambitions in the oil-rich Gulf. It was also unclear at first to whom, exactly, he reported, whether President Bush, the State Department, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Soon, however, it became clear that Bremer answered more or less directly to the president, and that meant that he usually bypassed the Pentagon in his initial decisions—even though the military, rather than their civilian overseers, were still far more engaged in organizing resistance to the insurgency. That ensured a dangerous bifurcation between civilian and military efforts in Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell was purportedly voi
cing concerns about his administration’s messy war off the record, both at home and abroad. In just a few weeks the so-called reconstruction seemed as disorganized as the military campaign had been nearly flawless. As the violence increased, those in Congress and the Pentagon with prior, but largely private, doubts about the war sought more explicit redemption from the press, as if they were not responsible for the ramifications of a war that they had opposed.15
In addition to problems of a unified military and civilian command, the Turkish Parliament at the final buildup to the Iraq War had unexpectedly denied the American 4th Infantry Division transit into Iraq from the north. That rejection in hindsight did not seem to be too harmful in the first weeks after the victory over Saddam Hussein. Yet soon the initial absence of Americans in the Sunni-controlled provinces would have lasting consequences for the course of the occupation. The eventual result was that thousands of crack American troops never entered northern Iraq as part of an expected pincer movement, leaving many of the recalcitrant Sunni provinces of Iraq simply untouched when the formal shooting stopped. NATO ally Turkey soon proved at best a neutral, and at worst tried to exercise veto power over Kurdish regional autonomy—in ominous signs of an increasing estrangement from its traditionally close relationship with Washington.
Millions of Sunni Iraqis had no reason either to fear or respect relatively small numbers of postwar American occupation troops who were careful not to ignite another war. Some began to act on that increasingly obvious fact of American caution. The notion of an American military “light footprint” had seemed to be working well in “postwar” Afghanistan and again during the initial three-week Iraqi war. Yet with the official fall of the Baathist government, thousands of humiliated Iraqis began to fathom that they had given up without much of a fight. The majority still had never seen any U.S. troops—either during the three-week war or now during the occupation.
The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Page 25
