I had recommended Casey to the President at Abizaid’s urging. Casey and his superior at CENTCOM were close personally and saw the Iraq war in similar terms. They emphasized transferring responsibility to the Iraqi government and training and equipping Iraqi forces so that American forces could begin to leave in an orderly fashion. With the end of the CPA, we had returned to our original emphasis on more modest goals—keeping the nation reasonably secure and enabling the Iraqis to defeat the insurgency over time.
In contrast to the strained relationship that characterized the Bremer and Sanchez pairing, Casey worked well with the first U.S. ambassador to a free Iraq, John Negroponte. Measured and calm, Negroponte was a forceful advocate for the United States. His approach was vastly more collaborative with our military commanders in Iraq than Bremer’s had been. Casey and Negroponte established their offices next to each other in Baghdad, as I had urged them to do before they left for Iraq. Together they created a joint campaign plan that for the first time in the conflict fully unified the military, economic, and diplomatic strands of the American effort toward common goals.
There was no shortage of work to be done in regaining the momentum toward Iraqi control that had slipped during the occupation. We had lost almost a year in training Iraq’s army and police forces because of bureaucratic differences and misplaced priorities. After reorienting the emphasis toward internal security, Abizaid and I made a priority of increasing the number of Iraqi security forces. Consistent with this goal, Ambassador Negroponte shifted substantial reconstruction funds away from infrastructure projects toward the training of Iraqi army and police forces.
I also pushed for more coalition forces to be involved in Iraq to lessen the burden on our troops. We could continue to bear the brunt of the difficult work, such as clearing and holding Iraqi neighborhoods, but other countries could pick up some of the slack by providing force protection at military bases and working at logistic hubs in Kuwait. If deploying troops to Iraq was politically too sensitive, I suggested that some countries replace American troops in places like the Sinai, Kosovo, and Bosnia, so we could focus more of our resources in Iraq and Afghanistan.2 I had pushed hard for a Muslim military contingent to go to Iraq to belie the propaganda aired on Al-Jazeera that America was waging a war against Islam.3 Turkey’s parliament had at one point agreed to deploy two divisions of troops. But suspicious of their neighboring countries, Iraqi leaders rejected the idea—to the detriment of Iraq’s security and to U.S.-Turkey relations.
Some critics contended we were using Iraqis interchangeably with our own forces, as if we thought a recently trained Iraqi soldier was as capable as a U.S. Marine or Army soldier.4 That was not so; we never envisioned the Iraqi security forces becoming the equivalent of the U.S. military. I did think we could aim for a competent, capable Iraqi force that, over time, could earn the respect and support of the Iraqi people. I believed that training and equipping Iraqis to secure their own country was the best strategy to achieve a government reasonably capable of dealing with the challenges it faced.*
Unlike most twentieth-century counterinsurgencies, such as that waged by the French in Algeria, the goal of the United States wasn’t an Iraq that was disarmed and unable to resist occupation. To the contrary, we wanted an Iraq that we could leave behind fully independent and capable of defending itself with a well-trained and well-armed police force and army. We had a major interest in ensuring the Iraqis were successful. But ultimately we knew that we couldn’t succeed for them. If more Iraqis didn’t stop insurgents from taking refuge in their neighborhoods, building car bombs in their garages, and destroying power lines and reconstruction projects, and start providing more intelligence tips to Iraqi security forces, then the Iraqi people were doomed to live in a destroyed, violence-engulfed country.6
After some difficult months under a two-star general whose efforts resulted in only modest progress, we needed a three-star general who could aggressively accelerate the development of local forces. To reorient the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and make their training and equipping a top priority, I settled on an Army general who had excelled as a division commander during the major combat operations stage.
David Petraeus began his career at West Point, where he would later return as a professor armed with a Princeton Ph.D. He was by many accounts ambitious and driven. His experience with low-intensity conflict and peacekeeping in Haiti and Bosnia had served him well during his first tour in Iraq, where he commanded the 101st Airborne Division. He demonstrated inventiveness in Mosul through engagement with the population and a willingness to improvise.7 He held local elections for a town council and undertook reconstruction projects at his division’s level, even as he had to cope with some CPA officials who were cool to initiatives coming from outside the Green Zone.
I’d had limited exposure to Petraeus at the time, so before settling on him I asked other senior officers for their assessments. The consensus was that he was cerebral, and savvy with the press. His personal public relations abilities were so good that the views of some of his colleagues were mixed. But despite some reservations by senior uniformed officials, I decided Petraeus would be a good fit for a mission in need of strong leadership.* In June 2004, Petraeus deployed on his second tour to Iraq and took charge of training and equipping the Iraqi security forces, with a mandate to make sure they could assume more responsibility fighting the insurgency.8
Generals Abizaid and Casey and I agreed that putting Iraqis forward to take the fight to the enemy and assume leadership of their country was our best weapon against the insurgency and the surest way to avoid more U.S. casualties that would eventually sap the political will for America’s effort in Iraq. We hoped that as Iraqis gained control of their destiny, the terrorists and regime remnants would no longer be seen as standing in opposition to Americans or coalition occupiers. Instead, the insurgents would be seen for what they were—opponents of the legitimate, elected Iraqi government.
When asked by reporters about the first signs of a sustained and organized resistance in April 2004 following the flare-up in Fallujah, I said, “Thugs and assassins and former Saddam henchmen will not be allowed to carve out portions of that city and to oppose peace and freedom. The dead enders, threatened by Iraq’s progress to self-government, may believe they can drive the coalition out through terror and intimidation, and foment civil war among Sunnis and Shias, or block the path to Iraqi self-rule, but they’re badly mistaken.”9 Some in the media mistook my use of the phrase “dead enders” to mean I was suggesting that victory was imminent, that the enemy would soon be defeated.10 In fact, my meaning was exactly the opposite—namely that our forces were locked in a bloody struggle with an enemy that would fight to the bitter end, to their deaths. Rather than dismissing the insurgents, I was saying that because they would fight to the end, our work against them would be difficult.11
In its early months the insurgency was dominated by former Baathist regime holdouts. Later, evidence was discovered that suggested that Saddam had planned to mount an insurgency if his conventional forces were unable to turn back a U.S.-led invasion. Saddam’s intelligence service disseminated messages to its members to organize a resistance by forming cells and training terrorists in the event of the regime’s collapse.12 General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam’s close associates and later a leader of the insurgency, led a secret program to launch a guerrilla war under the Unified Mujahedeen Command.13 Baathists, whose ideology is secular, nevertheless tapped into the potent force of jihadism, attracting devout fanatics to their cause.
The Baathist-jihadist axis, at least in its early phases, was less of an insurgency—an armed political movement that arose organically from the general population—and more a counterrevolution. It consisted mainly of Baathists seeking a return of their dictatorial power. When CENTCOM produced a list of the thirty-nine top leaders in the insurgency in the fall of 2004, almost all were connected to the old regime of Saddam. Indeed, early on one prominent insurgent gro
up called itself “the Party of the Return.”14
The insurgency began primarily as an effort to reclaim Sunni supremacy over Iraq’s Kurds and Shia. But by 2004 it had grown, bolstered by the support of a larger, more diverse group, not just of committed Baathists but of a number of non-Baathist Iraqi nationalists as well. Former Baathists exploited Islamist ideology to expand the conflict and attract recruits from all across the Muslim world. To anyone outside this privileged circle of Saddam regime loyalists, creating a new Islamic caliphate in Baghdad was far more appealing than reinstating Saddam and his ilk to power. The insurgency soon became dominated by foreign fighters and terrorists; predominant among them was a group calling itself al-Qaida in Iraq.
Al-Qaida’s followers infiltrated Iraq and took advantage of the Sunnis’ sense of disenfranchisement and alienation. Though only comprising approximately 20 percent of the population, Sunni Arabs had been the ruling class in Iraq since the British Mandate of Mesopotamia after World War I. But nearly overnight following Saddam’s fall, the Sunnis had become a mere minority in a country with a new Shia-led government. Neighboring Sunni governments in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria were unhappy and worried about the new order in Iraq. Iraqi Sunnis feared they might become targets of reprisals for past grievances, and al-Qaida capitalized on this insecurity. While our intelligence community’s prewar view was that secular Baathists and al-Qaida’s religious extremists would not cooperate, it had become obvious by 2004 that al-Qaida in Iraq had formed bases in Sunni populations throughout much of the country, using a combination of security promises, persistent recruitment efforts, and brutal intimidation.
At first this may have seemed an attractive alliance to the Sunnis, but al-Qaida was not interested in helping the Baathists return to power. Al-Qaida forces seized control of neighborhoods and villages. They labeled as traitors those Iraqis who cooperated with the Iraqi government or with the Americans. We received reports of terrorists who murdered children or booby-trapped dead bodies so that families would be killed when they tried to retrieve their loved ones. In Fallujah, those who refused to collaborate with the terrorists who controlled the city were beheaded and tossed into the Euphrates River.15
In November 2004, we recognized that our troops had to return to Fallujah. It was a sanctuary for al-Qaida in Iraq and much of the insurgency. Fifteen thousand U.S. Marines and soldiers along with two thousand Iraqi troops encircled the city. In the early morning hours of November 8, they swept northward through the city, block by block, engaging in the toughest urban fighting of the Iraq war. It also proved to be the bloodiest, with ninety-five American troops killed in combat. Though hard won, it was a key victory over the insurgents.16 Fallujah was cleared of the terrorists who had taken refuge there, and the city has never reverted to the enemy.
We had a priceless advantage in an ideological struggle against the enemy. We could offer the Iraqis a future the majority of Iraqis wanted—a future of self-government and national pride. We could also finally disprove the notion that the Americans were occupiers there to steal their oil. Elections would be a critical step toward that goal.
Holding an election during such a fragile period in a war-torn country carried significant risks. There was the obvious danger that terrorists could launch devastating attacks on Iraqi citizens on election day, setting back any political progress. We also had to keep in mind that if we rushed to national elections, we could end up with an antidemocratic result. Groups that were already well organized would have a major advantage if elections were held too soon. Those groups tended to be bankrolled by the Iranian regime and were deeply sectarian. If they emerged the ultimate winners, the long-term survival prospects of a free society in Iraq capable of resisting foreign influences would be slim. In the worst-case scenario, we could end up with leaders in power who rivaled Saddam in their lust for violence and support for terrorism.
Al-Qaida understood that the fight to establish a free, self-governing Iraq in the heart of the Arab world would be a critical threat to their cause. For some time prior to the elections, enemies of a free Iraq led by al-Qaida put up posters with messages such as “YOU VOTE. YOU DIE.” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who had proclaimed himself leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, declared “a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.” He called the elections a sham meant to deceive the Iraqi people and subjugate them to American puppets. “Anyone who tries to help set up this system is part of it,” he warned.17 Zarqawi claimed that anyone participating in elections was an apostate. The insurgents knew what a powerful threat the elections posed to their cause.
We set an ambitious schedule for three elections in 2005. The first election, which if successful promised to be a watershed event in the Arab world, was scheduled for January. Iraqis would vote to fill 275 seats in their national legislature. The legislature would then draft an Iraqi constitution. In the second vote, the Iraqi people would approve or reject the constitution in a referendum. And finally, the Iraqi people would elect a free Iraqi government under their new constitution.
As the first elections approached in January 2005, commentators across the world predicted disaster.18 Foreign affairs specialists called for postponement of the elections in light of the terrorists’ threats.19 There was a possibility that many voters, fearing for their lives and the lives of their families, would not show up at polling places. Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser for President Ford and later for President George H. W. Bush, as well as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, warned that the elections had “the great potential for deepening the conflict” in Iraq.20 Others worried that the lack of participation by minority Sunnis, who threatened to boycott the election, would undermine its legitimacy.
Like President Bush, I was determined that the elections go forward. I was under no illusions that free elections would quickly solve all of Iraq’s problems, but delaying the vote because of the intimidation of the terrorists would give them a major psychological victory and set back our efforts to help the Iraqis create a representative, sovereign government for themselves.
Iraq’s first election day was on Sunday, January 30, 2005, ten days after President Bush’s second inauguration. How many, I wondered, would show up at polling stations despite knowing they were risking their lives by voting? With Baghdad seven hours ahead of our time, preliminary reports were already coming in when I turned on the cable news early that Sunday morning.
There was no need for detailed expert analysis to understand the historical consequence of what was taking place across Iraq. The televised images said it all. There were long lines at polling places. Iraqi men dressed in their best clothes were standing proudly as they waited to cast their votes. Some brought their children to watch a piece of history unfold. Voters had to dip their index finger in indelible purple ink to assure that no one voted more than once—and these purple fingers became a proud symbol of participation in a free and fair election. No doubt citizens were emboldened by the highly visible presence of the Iraqi security forces that American forces had trained and equipped. They stayed at their posts and held their ground. Iraqi and coalition forces had imposed extensive security measures to try to prevent terrorist attacks, and their efforts were largely successful.
Over the course of the day, fear gave way to elation. Men and women danced in the streets and waved their purple fingers in the air.21 “It’s like a wedding. I swear to God, it’s a wedding for all of Iraq,” the director of one polling station in a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad rejoiced. “No one has ever witnessed this before. For a half-century, no one has seen anything like it. And we did it ourselves.”22
Nearly 60 percent of registered Iraqis had cast their ballots in defiance of al-Qaida threats and attempts at intimidation. Many Sunnis had not turned out, but they soon came to regret it, as they realized they would have little say in the formation of their new government. They resolved to participate in greater numbers next time.
Nine months later, Iraqis overwhelmingly approved the national constitution their elected representatives had drafted. The successful referendum belied the proposal that Iraq should be split into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd autonomous zones, an unhelpful idea some in Congress, Senator Joe Biden prominent among them, had been advocating.23
In the late autumn of 2005, we approached the third free election in Iraq, one that would establish a permanent Iraqi government. President Bush held an NSC meeting on November 2 to discuss the security strategy for the election and the perennial issue of U.S. troop levels. Did we need more? In the White House Situation Room, President Bush held forth, with General Casey and others joining on the secure video screen from Baghdad. We discussed ramping up troop levels with additional brigades to secure polling stations for the elections and to deal with any instability in the weeks after. We planned to increase troops to 160,000 and were considering sending two more brigades, as many as 10,000 additional troops.
“My recommendation is don’t deploy these two brigades,” General Casey said. “None of my commanders believe we need the force.”24
Casey and Abizaid would not fail to let their superiors in the chain of command know when and if they believed they needed to increase troop levels. They knew well that having too few troops could result in violence that might have been deterred. But like them, I was aware that if we added more troops at the wrong time and in the wrong places, we could weaken Iraqi leadership and stunt the development of a sovereign nation still in its formative stages. It was not a simple issue.
“We need to avoid dependency syndrome,” I added, supporting Abizaid and Casey’s view. “We need to take our hand off the bicycle seat.”
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