A senior public official confronts a test when presented with setbacks in a war. I had seen unconvincing overconfidence from Lyndon Johnson when the Vietnam War started to turn in 1966, and we certainly didn’t want to repeat that performance. The President and I saw it as our jobs to balance our concerns with what progress we saw, but without sounding like Pollyanna. If a broad majority in a democracy loses faith in the effort—and there was no mistaking in 2006 that Americans were losing confidence—it cannot be sustained.
As we gathered at Camp David for the June 12 NSC meeting, it was increasingly clear that despite Zarqawi’s death, the sectarian strife had not abated and insurgents seemed determined to wage more spectacular attacks. In light of this and the weakening support at home, Bush wanted to discuss any and all available alternatives. I supported that fully.
Abizaid and Casey argued to continue a steady drawdown of our forces. Even after a rise of violence in Iraq that year, their aim was to continue reducing American forces as Iraqi security forces stood up. I too was reluctant to place still more of the burdens in Iraq on Americans rather than on the Iraqis themselves.
Another option discussed at Camp David was the State Department’s proposal to draw forces out of Baghdad and major cities, and in effect out of conflict. The idea amounted to letting the sectarian bloodshed work itself out on the theory that American soldiers should not be drawn into an Iraqi civil war. Rice advocated this approach on the grounds that sectarian violence was an Iraqi problem and the Iraqis had to confront it. There was some logic to it, but the State Department approach seemed to be a path toward a staged withdrawal not dissimilar from our departure from Vietnam. There was one important difference: The ascendant Viet Cong and North Vietnamese would not follow us home. If we left Iraq to al-Qaida, we would be certain to have consequences at home with a greater likelihood of terrorist attacks in our cities.
There was another possibility: a counterinsurgency strategy that would put Iraqis in the lead. At the Camp David meeting, we discussed a proposal suggested by Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer. Vickers had worked for the CIA where he had played a role in arming the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union.* Prior to the Camp David meeting, Vickers had prepared a memo for the President. “One of the many paradoxes of modern counterinsurgency,” Vickers wrote, “is that less is often more.” He argued, as Abizaid had, that a successful strategy emphasized intelligence, the “dis-criminate use of force,” a focus on building popular support for the government, protecting the local population, and placing an emphasis on political reconciliation—including amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents. In contrast, he argued that counterinsurgency strategies that focused on “large-scale sweep and kill-capture operations” without emphasizing building up indigenous capacity to fight the enemy tended to be unsuccessful.
Noting that insurgencies are “protracted contests of wills,” Vickers’ paper stated that the problem we had faced over the most recent three years in Iraq was that “we have pursued a direct approach to counterinsurgency that has eroded American public support for the war (our center of gravity) more than it has reduced Iraqi support for the insurgency (our enemy’s center of gravity).” As a result, he noted, the insurgency had grown. Increasing force levels, he argued to the President, was “highly unlikely to be decisive.” Insurgents would still control the initiative, and could always temporarily decline to fight. Instead, he considered it “imperative” to shift to an indirect approach, requiring that we “begin and continue the drawdown of U.S. forces while the insurgency is still raging.” Our emphasis, instead, should be on providing “additional resources for Iraqi security forces,” including an increase in U.S. advisers.9
I found the Vickers proposal to be persuasive, including his emphasis on accelerating the pace at which we put Iraqis in the lead. When I had visited with Iraqi officials over the previous months, they told me that the presence of American forces in Iraqi cities had not been helpful and they should be reduced.10
I sent the Vickers memorandum around the Department of Defense to gauge the reactions of key personnel.11 The response was positive. Abizaid expressed a note of caution on troop drawdowns, saying that “the art in all of this is to reduce US forces at a rate that is neither too fast nor too slow.” I forwarded Abizaid’s memorandum to the President.12
After the Camp David discussions that June, the President didn’t indicate which way he was inclined to go on Iraq. A month later, as sectarian violence increased again, we had another NSC meeting, this time in the White House Roosevelt Room. The mood was downbeat. Khalilzad and Casey had ugly statistics to report.
“The violence is now focused on civilians,” Khalilzad said.
“Death squads were responsible for 230 deaths last week, with 200 in Baghdad alone. The Iraqi government is not enforcing the law against the militias,” Casey added. Over the past month, sixteen hundred bodies, 90 percent believed to be from executions, had been taken to the Baghdad coroner’s office.13 Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was seen as giving tacit support to the Shia death squads. Maliki was even lobbying for some of Muqtada al-Sadr’s captured lieutenants, known to be responsible for the death squads, to be released from U.S. custody. We declined his request and in fact had directed McChrystal to have U.S. special operations forces target and capture the facilitators of the death squads, some of whom had ties to Iran.
Maliki would be making his first visit to the United States the following week, and it would be a chance for all of us to make clear the gravity of the situation. He needed to understand that if he failed to root out the Shia sectarians that had infiltrated the security forces and upper levels of his government and did not pursue reconciliation with alienated Sunnis, his country would continue to burn. His countrymen had not selected him to watch the country descend into a civil war. History—and the Iraqi electorate—would not be kind to a leader who appeared oblivious to the plight of his people.
President Bush responded, “Last week Maliki was claiming that he wanted to crack down but that U.S. military forces wouldn’t let him. If Maliki tries to lay this offon us, it will be an unpleasant visit for him.”14 Maliki knew his claims were untrue. Casey and Abizaid had made clear their desire to pursue the sectarian militias. The obstacle was Maliki’s government, which was even considering bringing some of the rogue militias directly into the Iraqi security forces.15
Three days later I talked with Khalilzad, Abizaid, and Casey by a secure videoconference. Our military operations seemed to be having little impact on the growing sectarian violence. “Are we at an inflection point?” I asked. “If we are, it’s helpful to consider the alternatives.” I raised a number of ideas that might change the worsening dynamics that appeared to be approaching a tipping point. Could we just let Iraqis separate themselves and stand aside? Could we “side” with the Iraqi Sunnis or Shia instead of being caught in the middle? Could we deploy an additional number of U.S. forces? Would they be able to stanch the sectarian bloodletting?
Abizaid responded, “The level of violence isn’t the measure of success. We have to make this point.”16 He didn’t want the enemy dictating the terms of battle. They could easily increase their savagery. He thought there were better ways to measure progress: The intelligence cooperation we were getting from local Iraqis, electricity production, the number of Iraqi troops and police we were training, the number of provinces turned over to Iraqi control, and the like.17
In August 2006, Casey told General Pace and me that he thought we needed to put more troops into Baghdad in an attempt to curb the sectarian killings. He thought the best way to increase troops temporarily was to not only deploy new units to Iraq, but to extend the yearlong tour of the 172nd Stryker Brigade by three or four months. Strykers are armored patrol vehicles, light enough to conduct operations in cities and armored enough to defend against gunfire and some roadside bombs. The four thousand men and women of the 172nd had done a superb job in securing Mosul. General Casey now ne
eded them in Baghdad.*
I decided to fly to Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the 172nd Stryker Brigade was based. My unpleasant task was to explain to the spouses why their loved ones would not be coming home from Iraq when they had been scheduled to. They had been due back in mere days. Some members of the unit had already returned to prepare for the brigade’s homecoming and were themselves now going back to Iraq.
Before I had left for Alaska, I was told by senior Army officials that they had talked with the families and explained the situation to them. As I learned when I arrived, that was not the case. They had only talked by video teleconference to a few of the senior officers’ spouses. In fact, I would be the first Pentagon official to meet personally with these understandably disappointed and in some cases angry family members. As I headed to the base from the airport, “welcome home” signs dotted the road—signs that now were sadly premature. I then went to meet some eight hundred family members who were gathered in a gymnasium.
I explained the reasons behind the rare extension. General Casey had told me he needed more troops in Iraq at this time. “It’s something we don’t want to do, but in this case we had to,” I told them. One woman asked me to wear a green bracelet she had braided until her husband came home. I kept it on my left wrist until that December, when the last of the 172nd Stryker Brigade finally made it home to Alaska.19 I still have it to this day.
After brief remarks I opened it up for questions from the audience. Some emotionally expressed their deep disappointment that their family members would not be coming home when they had been told; most were polite, surprisingly so. I knew it was a terrible disappointment for all of them. Everyone in the large gymnasium had endured a year of waiting and praying for the safe return of their loved ones.
After taking questions, I stayed for a long time visiting personally with the military families. As I was about to leave, a woman from behind me whispered in my ear, “You have to have big brass ones to come in here and face this crowd.” Amused, I turned and saw she was smiling, too.
In September 2006, a sensational press report fueled the calls for withdrawal from Iraq. Citing an August 2006 Marine intelligence report, an article in the Washington Post claimed that the Iraqi province of Anbar, a Sunni-majority area on Iraq’s western border, was “lost” to the enemy. “[T]he prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim. . . . There is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there,” it concluded.20 The notion that terrorists had won a part of Iraq was the psychological equivalent of reporting that parts of postwar Germany were lost and would remain under the control of the Nazis.
What the author of the misguided article ignored was that the report the article cited was being overtaken by events on the ground. The Sunnis in Anbar province were turning against the Baathist-jihadist axis and seeking a new way forward for Iraq’s Sunni minority. In fact, six months before the article appeared, General Casey had briefed the President that “Anbarites are tired of violence,” and a wedge existed between the Sunni resistance groups and al-Qaida in Iraq.21 We had been working assiduously over 2006 to expand and exploit those differences. By late summer, the efforts were beginning to bear fruit.
Since 2003, I had encouraged our military and the CPA to form alliances with local tribal leaders, particularly as part of an outreach effort to Sunnis.22 Abizaid was an early and consistent advocate of approaching the Sunnis with financial and other assistance. And as early as 2005, Sunni tribal sheikhs in parts of Iraq formed alliances with our military to take on the jihadists, most of them non-Iraqis, who had established roots in some Sunni cities and neighborhoods. In post-Saddam Iraq, many Sunnis had until that point pursued a strategy of allying with foreign jihadists to kill Shia, create maximum disorder, and hope to ultimately drive out the impatient Americans. The theory was that the Sunnis would inherit the chaos and restore themselves to power.
But Iraq’s Sunnis were contemplating a major change in their strategy just as our military commanders were pursuing new tactics. In late 2005, our commanders had brought to bear new counterinsurgency tactics and forged alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in the western cities of Tal Afar and Qaim.23 Enterprising colonels such as H. R. McMaster and Sean MacFarland were forging new operational techniques and tactics and applying the art of counterinsurgency.24 U.S. troops were clearing neighborhoods infiltrated with insurgents and al-Qaida. They held the ground until Iraqi security forces were sufficiently capable of maintaining security. The yields were impressive in a part of Iraq that many had written off to the enemy.
Though the terrorists often invoked the lessons of Vietnam and Lebanon, they did not heed all of them. Unlike other successful insurgency movements, al-Qaida in Iraq and its many affiliated organizations did not offer the Iraqis the promise of a better life. Instead, they offered the Iraqi people brutality and terror. Their approach was to bully and intimidate the local people into submission. Al-Qaida’s vision was a kind of nihilism cloaked in the trappings of a twisted version of their religion.
The local population had an opportunity to see the kind of a future that al-Qaida would offer them and the rest of Iraq. Iraq’s Sunnis recognized the need to break with the Islamist insurgency and to seek the protection U.S. forces could provide from their violence-obsessed former allies in al-Qaida and from the retribution of Iraq’s Shia. The barbaric behavior of al-Qaida and its affiliated organizations had frayed their relations with Sunni tribes. Al-Qaida members were skilled in the arts of intimidation: They would “marry”—an al-Qaida euphemism for sexual assault—local women, push tribes off their land, and seize profitable activities traditionally under tribal purview. Rather than integrating with the Sunni tribes, al-Qaida sought to colonize Iraq’s western provinces and turn them into the “Islamic State of Iraq.” Raising revenues through smuggling and extortion, al-Qaida achieved tribal acquiescence by kidnapping, torturing, and murdering the tribal leaders and their families who stood in their way.
So in August 2006, even as some in the media were mistakenly proclaiming Anbar “lost” to the enemy, our military was actively negotiating with tribal sheikhs for them to turn against al-Qaida and join the side of the Iraqi government and our forces. In Anbar’s capital of Ramadi, Army officers were establishing small outposts in the heart of enemy territory, enduring fierce enemy fire in the process. They pressed ahead on reconstruction projects and began craing deals with the local sheikhs. If the sheikhs encouraged tribal members to join the police, Army commanders agreed to let them protect their own localities. Police recruits tripled in both June and in July. In August alone, there were close to one thousand new recruits.25
Part of the reason Sunni sheikhs were willing to change sides was their growing understanding that our forces would stay in Iraq only as long as necessary. In September 2006, a fledgling movement among Iraqi tribal sheikhs around Ramadi was starting to take shape, which became known as “the Awakening.”26 By October 2006, we were briefing the President on the Anbar tribal leaders leading the resistance.27 And by the end of 2006, this alliance, also called “the Sons of Iraq,” was one hundred thousand strong. The Sons of Iraq took the lead in reclaiming Anbar province for the Iraqi people and in driving al-Qaida out.
Unquestionably, the rise of this movement was an essential factor in the later turnaround in Iraq. But there was still another significant change afoot.
As calls for a fundamental reassessment of the Iraq strategy grew louder, former vice chief of the Army, retired General Jack Keane, came to visit me on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 19, 2006. He got right to the point. Violence in Iraq was spiraling upward. The American people were fed up and ready to get out. He did not think Generals Abizaid and Casey were sufficiently aware of the gravity of the situation and how perilously close the nation was to withdrawing its support.
Though I didn’t share with Keane our internal deliberations or my discussions with the President, his thoughts larg
ely dovetailed with mine. What we were doing in Iraq was not working well enough or fast enough. This also was not the first time I had heard the suggestion that Abizaid and Casey should come home. General Pace and I already had been giving thought to their replacements. Casey had originally gone to Iraq on a twelve-month tour, and he had agreed to stay for two six-monThextensions. Abizaid had already come to me and told me he believed we needed, as he put it, “fresh eyes” on the situation. As early as June 2006, Pace and I had begun discussing with the President potential candidates for both positions.*
No one on the National Security Council or Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended to me that either Abizaid or Casey should be removed. Nor were there even suggestions from anyone on the NSC that they were doing a poor job. To the contrary, by autumn 2006, the President was making a strong pitch to keep Abizaid working for him and had offered Abizaid a post in the White House to oversee the war on terror after he left CENTCOM. Bush also was considering Abizaid for director of national intelligence. As the wheels were in motion to replace Abizaid and Casey, perhaps by assigning them to new duties, Pace, Vice Chairman Ed Giambastiani, Deputy Secretary Gordon England, and I had narrowed the short list of replacements for Casey to Lieutenant Generals David Petraeus, Stan McChrystal, Pete Chiarelli, and Martin Dempsey. For CENTCOM commander, we were considering McChrystal, Chiarelli, and Dempsey.
In one Friday morning meeting on October 20, with Pace and Eric Edelman, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and Abizaid and Casey reporting via secure video teleconference, there were signs that there was little new thinking about our course of action. With an NSC meeting at the White House scheduled for the following morning, I wanted us prepared to answer the President’s likely questions. He had been growing impatient. Again I raised the possibility of deploying more troops into Iraq. I asked Abizaid and Casey if that could help stem the violence.
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