The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  Around 6:00 p.m. Casey was preparing to meet with his staff when Rumsfeld called. “George, when the eyes of the world were on you, you stood and delivered,” the defense secretary told him. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” Casey replied. “I’ll pass that on to everybody.” Petraeus telephoned Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been one of the leading advocates for the invasion. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen had turned out to help guard polling places, he said. For the first time since the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi tanks were out on the capital city’s streets. Given the past month’s failures, this was great news. Wolfowitz asked Petraeus to send photos of soldiers and tanks. He wanted to show the American people that the Iraqis were finally taking responsibility for their own country.

  As the day drew to a close Casey stood and addressed his staff. “What a historic day,” he said as the applause welled up from his men. He then returned to his quarters and called Sheila, who was crying tears of joy and relief for him. When he hung up, Casey and his aide, Major Tony Hale, walked out onto the patio behind his quarters at Camp Victory and smoked cigars. Hale brought out a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy, and they toasted their success. “From then on, I thought, ‘This will work,’” Casey recalled years later.

  The next morning Casey spoke with Abizaid by phone. The two friends chatted amiably while Casey’s staff listened: “Yeah, John, I know. Great outcome, great outcome,” Casey said. In the Pentagon’s daily summary of U.S. press clippings there wasn’t a single negative article, he noted. Doty, sitting on the black leather couch in Casey’s small Green Zone office, couldn’t resist puncturing the euphoria a bit. Turning to Casey, he recalled the end of the movie Patton. World War II is over. Patton, played by the actor George C. Scott, walks his dog. He is only a few months from his death. In the background, Scott’s deep, rough voice recalls that when victorious Roman generals returned from war they were honored with a parade. The conquering general would ride in a triumphal chariot. Just behind him stood a slave who would whisper in his ear, “All glory is fleeting. All glory is fleeting.”

  “Maybe I should be the slave at the end of Patton whispering, ‘All glory is fleeting,’” Doty said.

  Casey shot Doty an annoyed look. He knew the elections weren’t going to solve all of Iraq’s problems. Only the Shiites and Kurds had really turned out to vote. Most Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the insurgency, had boycotted the elections and would almost certainly continue to fight. But after seven exhausting, frustrating months, he needed a moment to savor his victory.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Bunker in Jadiriyah

  Al Faw Palace, Camp Victory

  March 4, 2005

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was furious. “I am not sure I am ready to move this forward to the president,” he growled at Casey over the video hookup from the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was referring to Casey’s strategy to accelerate the training of Iraqi army and police forces so that U.S. troops could start coming home. Casey had been briefing the defense secretary on the plan since January.

  The idea was relatively straightforward. The tough fighting in the fall of 2004 had shown that Iraqi units operating with small teams of embedded U.S. advisors performed better than Iraqi units fighting alone. Casey was proposing to expand the teams to every brigade and battalion in the Iraqi army and as many police units as possible. With such close partnership, the Iraqis would progress faster and soon take over the lead in fighting the insurgency. The initial concept was from Abizaid, but he’d also warned Rumsfeld in an earlier e-mail that it would bring significant new risks: U.S. advisors would be living with Iraqi troops in “isolated and exposed places.” To make it work, the teams would have to be filled with tough, resourceful soldiers.

  Rumsfeld’s problem wasn’t with the strategy. He was angry at what he considered a grave bureaucratic sin. Casey had shared a version of his plan with the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. His instinct was to work closely with the ambassador and his staff. The ambassador, in turn, had informed the State Department, and somehow Rumsfeld had found out about it. “Please explain how this happens, that the world gets papered with a military proposal from Embassy Baghdad that hasn’t been considered or approved at our level, despite the fact that the president has repeatedly said that he wanted to be involved in it,” Rumsfeld had written in an e-mail to Casey and Abizaid two days before the videoconference. Whenever Casey opened his mouth Rumsfeld cut him off. “You act like the whole world started with you and Petraeus,” he scolded at one point. Casey kept his cool. The best way to handle an angry Rumsfeld was to let him vent.

  The defense secretary wasn’t much of a counterinsurgency strategist, but he was an expert bureaucratic infighter who wanted to control the flow of information to the president. He didn’t want the State Department to see the plan until it was shown to Bush. By that point, it would be too late for Condoleezza Rice and her aides to muck around with it. Working for Rumsfeld was a mixed blessing. He defended his subordinates from meddling by other agencies like an angry pit bull. He was frequently warm, charitable, and funny. But his rabid defense of his bureaucratic turf was also isolating. It would cut Casey off from the growing frustration in the White House and the State Department as violence rose and the president began to lose confidence in his leadership. It also prevented Casey from getting feedback that might have exposed the flaws in his plan.

  After barking at Casey, Rumsfeld dropped his objections and arranged for him to brief the president. Casey and a few key aides sat in the secure videoconference room at Al Faw. Abizaid joined in from Qatar. Bush participated from the White House. The average counterinsurgency war lasted between nine and thirteen years, Casey explained to Bush. There was no way that U.S. forces were going to be in Iraq for that long. Therefore they had to train Iraqis to take over by increasing the number of advisory teams. As Iraqi troops took on more responsibility U.S. troops could pull back, reducing the stigma of the American occupation and bolstering the legitimacy of the government.

  The president had reservations. The new approach seemed to focus more on shifting the fight to the Iraqis than on defeating the insurgency. “George, we’re not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we understand this, don’t we?” Bush said. He had grand visions for Iraq. He still wanted to transform it into a model democracy and, in contrast to Rumsfeld, was in no rush to hand it off to a bunch of incompetent Iraqi troops.

  Bush’s critique not only caught Casey by surprise but stung him. “Mr. President, we are not playing for a tie,” Casey shot back with a rare edge to his voice. “I just can’t accept that. We are playing to win.” He was used to hostile questions from Rumsfeld. But this was different. The president was questioning his commitment. He was, in effect, suggesting that Casey was sending soldiers to their deaths for a strategy that he didn’t think would acttually win. After the briefing, Abizaid tried to ease the tension. “George, you shouldn’t yell at the president,” he said half jokingly.

  In June Casey flew back to Washington with Abizaid to secure Bush’s final approval for his new strategy. The war wasn’t going well. Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a physician who spoke so softly that he often seemed to be whispering, had been sworn in as interim prime minister. Casey had hoped that Jaafari, a Shiite, would reach out to rival sects and ethnic groups and unite the country, but so far he was disappointed. “This guy is a political wind sock,” he told Abizaid. Violence rose as Sunnis, who felt disenfranchised by the January election, turned to extremists. In May there were a record 142 car bombs. When Casey landed in Washington he was dreading his meeting with Bush. “Goddammit, I just don’t feel like I am prepared,” he groused to his senior aide.

  The president put him at ease. “Thanks for pushing back at me. I appreciate that,” Bush said, referring to the tense videoconference. He approved Casey’s new strategy. Actually fielding the advisory teams at the heart of the new approach would prove tougher than Casey had anticipated, however. The Army staff in the Pentagon initially
balked at finding 2,500 majors, lieutenant colonels, and senior sergeants for the teams. It didn’t sound like a lot of extra manpower. But the Pentagon generals complained that to fill the request they would have to strip combat brigades of their leaders. Instead of assigning seasoned officers to the teams, as Abizaid and Casey wanted, the Army would instead rely heavily on inexperienced reservists.

  At the White House that day, though, everyone was still hopeful. After the president had signed off on the strategy, Casey updated him on the plans for the latter half of 2005. They were still on track for a constitutional referendum in October 2005 followed by another national election in late December. “You know, Mr. President, George will be gone by then,” Rumsfeld interjected, noting that the general’s official orders were for only twelve months and expired in August.

  The president thought for a minute. “Eisenhower didn’t leave the war after a year.”

  “Eisenhower lived in London,” Abizaid playfully shot back from across the table.

  “I shouldn’t be asking you this …,” Bush said. Rumsfeld rose to his feet, stood behind his Iraq commander, and began to chant enthusiastically, “Oh, yes, you should, Mr. President! Yes, you should!”

  With Rumsfeld egging him on, Bush asked Casey to stay in Iraq through at least the end of 2005. Casey later got his official orders extending his time for six more months—the first of three such extensions. Three decades earlier Casey’s father had been only a few months away from finishing his second tour in Vietnam when he received new orders assigning him to stay in Vietnam and take command of the 1st Cavalry Division. Shortly after he was extended, he died in the helicopter crash. As Casey studied his new orders, he thought of his dad and had a fleeting feeling that he might be killed before he made it home. He didn’t mention it to anyone until he left Iraq for good.

  Petraeus, meanwhile, had his own Washington problems. In early 2005 Rumsfeld had dispatched a team led by General Gary Luck, a retired former head of U.S. forces in Korea, to look into the effort to rebuild a new army and police force. They arrived in Baghdad convinced that the effort was on the verge of collapse. Petraeus did in fact need help—lots of it. His staff was made up of inexperienced National Guardsmen and whomever he could grab from Sosh and the 101st Airborne Division. His task was massive. But he bristled at the suggestion that he needed a lifeline from Washington. Petraeus had always believed that he could make up for a lack of resources with more effort. War was about will, perseverance, force of personality, and determination. No one possessed those qualities in greater abundance; he’d proven it his entire career. It wasn’t in his nature to admit that he was failing. As Jack Galvin had observed twenty years earlier, he never admitted mistakes.

  Petraeus led Luck’s team through a three-hour briefing. It rapidly turned contentious, with Luck interrupting several times to ask him what he needed to speed the development of the Iraqi forces. Soon the exasperated general was waving his wallet at Petraeus. “Dave, here, take my wallet,” he said in his southern drawl. “I am not here to criticize you. I am here to help you.”

  When that failed, Luck tried a new line of questioning. How many Iraqi battalions would it take to secure Iraq without the United States? The answer, Petraeus said, depended on a host of factors—the enemy’s strength, politics, and the quality of the battalion and brigade commanders.

  “Come on, Dave! What’s the requirement?” asked Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, another member of Luck’s team. Petraeus, his voice tight and angry, repeated his earlier caveats. But Odierno wasn’t going to let it go. “What is the requirement?” he demanded again.

  After the meeting, Odierno spoke privately to Petraeus. The two generals had sped up the career ladder ahead of their peers and had both commanded divisions in northern Iraq in 2003. Petraeus’s 101st Airborne Division was everyone’s favorite success story. Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division was cited as an example of the overaggressive failed tactics in the early days of the war. The criticism actually had seemed to burnish his reputation with Rumsfeld, who favored a hard-nosed approach. “Look, you need to understand that Washington is impatient,” said Odierno, who stood six feet four inches tall and had the body of an offensive lineman. He towered over his much smaller colleague.

  “I got it,” Petraeus replied. “But there is hardly a Ministry of Defense here. There is hardly a Ministry of the Interior. There is no training and doctrine command.” His biggest problem was finding Iraqi commanders who wouldn’t abandon their troops in the middle of a firefight. He needed time.

  “The best leaders we have found so far are from a jail alumni association,” Petraeus told Odierno. He was referring to an unplanned unit that the interim interior minister had created and named the Special Police Commandos. “This is the force that will save Iraq,” the minister had boasted to him in the fall of 2004. At first Petraeus had been skeptical; the Iraqis regularly made grand promises that never panned out. When he finally went to see them he’d been impressed. Several hundred commandos, clad in mismatched uniforms and led by tough sergeants, were training at a bombed-out base just beyond the western gate to the Green Zone. Iraqi units typically did a horrible job maintaining their equipment, but the commandos’ weapons, scrounged from Saddam-era stockpiles, were clean and well oiled. Petraeus had been knocking his head against a wall for months trying to build a unit like the commandos, with little success. Out of nowhere a seemingly outstanding unit had appeared only a few hundred yards from his headquarters. It was almost too good to be true—a desert mirage.

  “How did you pick these guys?” Petraeus asked the commander of the unit, Major General Andan Thavit, who also happened to be the interim interior minister’s uncle.

  “I knew them all in jail. Every one of us was arrested by Saddam,” Thavit replied. He had been a two-star general in Saddam’s intelligence service until an unsuccessful 1995 coup attempt landed him on death row. Before his nephew summoned him to Baghdad, the jowly sixty-three-year-old general had been sitting at home. Now he ruled his men with a mixture of fear and charisma. Thavit wore black leather jackets regardless of the weather and chain-smoked. When commandos entered his sparse office, they stamped their right boot, flashed an exaggerated salute, and stood rigidly at attention. He frequently threatened to cut off the testicles of any of his soldiers caught stealing. No one was entirely sure if he was kidding.

  Petraeus supplied them with uniforms, ammunition, and a fleet of camouflage-painted Dodge Ram pickups with machine guns bolted to the back. The commandos raced off to fight insurgents. In Mosul, occupying police stations that had been overrun in the November 2004 fighting, they withstood a four-hour barrage that killed twelve commandos but didn’t break the unit. Without them, Mosul never would have been able to participate in the January elections, Petraeus said.

  The commandos were not perfect soldiers, by any means. They looted constantly. “Every time they’d move from one place to another they’d take a lot of stuff with them. It was just very unprofessional conduct,” Petraeus recalled. In early 2005 there were persistent but unproven rumors that they were abusing prisoners. In the spring Petraeus obtained pictures of detainees who had been beaten in the commandos’ custody. He was furious. “I know you guys think you know [how to handle Iraqis] better than we do and that a little abuse is accepted,” he told Thavit angrily. “It is not acceptable.” Thavit promised to stop immediately.

  At the time Petraeus had other problems. His command was now responsible for training and equipping more than 100 battalions, the growing commando force, and more than 130,000 regular police. To meet the growing demand he figured he needed to add about 150 U.S. troops to his 550-soldier training outfit. The request, however, languished at Casey’s level for months. Finally Petraeus demanded a meeting with Casey’s chief of staff, Marine Corps Major General Tim Donovan, who had to sign off on the request before it could be sent to the Pentagon. For the next five hours he and his staff went through all 150 positions in the manning document with Donov
an, justifying the need for each one. They jokingly dubbed the marathon session “Operation Breaking of the Will.” A few days later, Donovan ran into Petraeus at Al Faw Palace and told him that he was going to have to trim the request a bit more. “Goddammit, chief, you are screwing us,” Petraeus yelled, slamming his fist into the wall.

  Abizaid had promised Petraeus whatever he needed, but he wasn’t getting it. Petraeus didn’t directly blame Casey for the struggles he was having finding troops for his staff. After a rocky start, the relationship between the two generals had warmed. Instead he guessed that both Casey and Abizaid were under pressure from Rumsfeld to bring down troop numbers. Even a request for a measly 150 soldiers was going to set off alarms in the Pentagon.

  Casey was under pressure from Rumsfeld to cut forces, but some of the pressure was also self-generated. He firmly believed that the longer the United States stayed in Iraq, the longer radical groups such as Al Qaeda would pick away at its forces. Sooner or later the attacks would exhaust the patience of the American people. The only way to win was to pare back troop levels and make the Iraqis do more. Casey knew that his subordinate commanders, including Petraeus, weren’t going to volunteer to get by with fewer soldiers. Iraq was a “troop sump,” he said, meaning there was an almost endless supply of tasks to be done in the country. If he didn’t set tight limits, he believed, the force would grow forever.

  By the summer of 2005 Iraq’s “purple finger moment,” in which Iraqis held up ink-stained fingers to celebrate their first election in three decades, had long passed. It was obvious to lower-ranking officers that something was badly wrong. One of the most influential young skeptics was Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who returned from a year of tough fighting in Iraq in the fall of 2004 and found that he was something of a celebrity. Nagl’s fame came not from battlefield heroics, but from the book on counterinsurgency that he had written while teaching in the Social Sciences Department at West Point. In it, he contrasted the U.S. defeat in Vietnam with the British victory in Malaya in the 1950s against another Communist insurgency. The difference, Nagl argued, was that the British generals saw the folly of using massive force against guerrillas who were often indistinguishable from ordinary villagers. Instead they focused on building local governments, training security forces, and protecting the civilians. In Vietnam, the United States resorted largely to search-and-destroy tactics after they began funneling in large numbers of troops.