by Greg Jaffe
There were more episodes like this one the longer Casey remained in command, moments that raised fundamental questions about the course the United States was embarked upon in Iraq. If the Interior Ministry had been infiltrated by Shiite militias that abused Sunnis and was headed by a minister who denied the evidence, how could the United States proceed with its plans to place it in charge of security? Wasn’t that a path to failure? Casey wasn’t blind to these and other contradictions. He had been in command for nearly eighteen months, longer than any other senior American, military or civilian, and knew better than most the flaws at the core of the U.S. effort. Not that Casey doubted the course he was on. He was in many ways the prototypical officer, curious and thoughtful, open to new information and ready to adjust—but usually at the margins, enough to assure himself that whatever problems existed were being addressed, if not entirely resolved. The meetings at Adnan Palace and with the prime minister were good examples. He wasn’t going to let the incident pass, but he wasn’t going to provoke a showdown, either. It wasn’t his job. This was a sovereign country, and it was up to the ambassador to handle the prime minister and major political issues, not him. Besides, he told himself, the last round of national elections was only a few weeks away. The next government would be better.
Casey had arrived in Iraq determined to keep his goals limited, not to take on tasks beyond the military’s purview and ability. It was the same mind-set that the Army had adopted during the 1990s peacekeeping missions in an attempt to avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire, which had destroyed the force. The longer he remained in Baghdad the more he became convinced of this logic. Military power could drive down the violence and buy time to build a government. But the military couldn’t force the Iraqis to get along with each other; it couldn’t win the war. There were big downsides to expanding the military’s role. Asking the Army to do more, he believed, risked breaking the institution to which he had dedicated his life and cared for deeply.
By early 2006, however, people who mattered were beginning to doubt him and the strategy. In November, Senator John McCain went public with his criticism in a major speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank a few blocks from the White House. The lunchtime audience overflowed into the hallways, straining to catch every word from the former prisoner of war who would shortly announce his candidacy for the presidency. “There is an undeniable sense that things are slipping,” he said, reciting the worrisome trends in Iraq. He was careful not to blame the White House or even Rumsfeld, whom he privately considered a disaster. Instead the former Navy pilot aimed his remarks at the military men in Baghdad. U.S. commanders had been slow to adopt “a true counterinsurgency strategy” that emphasized protecting the population and holding on to areas cleared of insurgents, he said. Wrongheaded plans were afoot to reduce troop levels and hand off the mission as quickly as possible to the Iraqi army and police. “Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up,” he declared, and instead of rotating its generals after one-year tours, the Pentagon should keep the best of them in Iraq, mentioning Petraeus, Chiarelli, and others. “We need these commanders and their hard-won experience to stay in place.” He didn’t praise or even mention Casey. That was the way a mugging was done in Washington.
Petraeus was about as far from the war as a soldier could get. When he first learned that he had been chosen to head the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was disappointed. He wasn’t entirely sure what his new command even did. Digging into it on the Internet, he learned that he’d have responsibility for running the Army’s nationwide network of training centers and schools. He would also oversee the drafting of Army doctrine. Gradually Petraeus’s enthusiasm built.
Every couple of days Petraeus would regale Colonel J. R. Martin, his former West Point classmate, with some new aspect of the job that had piqued his intellect. Martin had a more immediate worry: “I was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get promoted out of it,” he recalled. Even among Petraeus’s clique of supporters, the orders sending him to the Kansas outpost were seen as a sign that the higher brass thought that the ambitious general, after almost thirty months in Iraq, needed a good rest—or that the Army needed a rest from him.
On a crisp October afternoon, Petraeus took command at Fort Leavenworth from Lieutenant General William Wallace. When Wallace had been sent to Kansas in mid-2003, it was widely seen as punishment, meted out by Rumsfeld, after the general confessed to a reporter that the United States hadn’t anticipated the waves of crazed Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas that harassed U.S. troops on their initial drive to Baghdad. “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against,” he’d said. At Leavenworth, Wallace hadn’t made big changes. Petraeus wasted no time in demonstrating that he had an altogether different approach to the job. After an honor guard fired the traditional fifteen-gun salute, a sergeant handed Petraeus a gleaming brass shell casing from the barrage. “I don’t know how you got it polished up so quickly,” he said, fingering the spent cartridge, “but you clearly know how I like to operate.”
Far from the battlefields of Iraq—where the war was going from bad to much worse—the bright and ambitious general began plotting an insurgency of his own, one aimed at changing his service. Like any good guerrilla, Petraeus chose to attack a spot that was poorly defended: the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine. By 2005 the doctrine hadn’t been revised in more than a quarter of a century; it was a dusty document that few even bothered to read.
A year earlier, Wallace, whose first assignment in the Army had been as an advisor to the South Vietnamese army, had assigned a lieutenant colonel who had never laid eyes on Iraq to rewrite the document. The overwhelmed officer labored in almost complete obscurity. In a matter of days, the new commanding general made rewriting the counterinsurgency doctrine his top priority. Doctrine provides an intellectual framework for how to fight different kinds of wars. Often it is written to reflect conventional Army wisdom. In rare instances, new doctrine has driven major changes in the Army. In the early 1980s the Army unveiled the AirLand Battle Doctrine, a recipe for defeating much larger Soviet armor formations. It called on commanders to strike ninety miles behind the front lines with helicopters and artillery, using speed, cunning, and intuition to surprise the more mechanistic Soviets. The doctrine, which drove the Army for two decades, was an explicit rejection of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s rigid, measurement-focused approach to war.
Petraeus wanted his counterinsurgency doctrine to have the same impact as AirLand Battle. At the time, he had a couple of big strikes against him. One was Fort Leavenworth itself. Even by Army standards, the base is in the middle of nowhere. A nineteenth-century frontier fort located on the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, an hour’s drive from Kansas City, it is probably best known as the site of an old limestone prison. It doesn’t get much attention from Washington except when a high-profile inmate arrives in leg irons. Leavenworth is also home to the Army’s staff college, where young, rising officers learn to do war planning. The post’s red brick houses, lecture halls, and softball fields make it feel more like a tweedy midwestern liberal arts campus than an Army base. Petraeus had spent a year there in 1982—an uneventful sojourn, except that he graduated first in his class. He hadn’t been back since.
The second major handicap Petraeus faced was that doctrine is hardly an exciting topic. He asked Conrad Crane, a classmate of his from West Point who had written extensively about counterinsurgency and taught history at the Army War College, to oversee a large team that was going to rewrite the new doctrine. Petraeus enlisted a number of high-profile Washington figures, both military and civilian. Among those included was Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins professor who had been a critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the war and would go on to serve in the influential position of counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He also called on now Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, the Rhodes scholar and Sosh alum whose book o
n Vietnam and Malaya had made him a minor celebrity, appearing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. In early 2006, Nagl was working in the Pentagon, where he was growing increasingly disillusioned with the war effort.
Finally Petraeus called a friend who had served in the Clinton administration, Sarah Sewall, who was running Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights. He’d met her in the early 1990s when he was doing his research project on the U.S. intervention in Haiti. The center agreed to cosponsor a Fort Leavenworth conference to provide suggestions for improving the new doctrine’s first draft. Petraeus made sure the conference received the proper attention, flying in congressional staffers, journalists, and a bevy of political scientists, human rights advocates, and military historians.
He held court before them for two days. At a dinner on the first night, he unveiled a recent article he’d written for Military Review on the fourteen most important things he’d learned from soldiering in Iraq. The observations weren’t especially novel, but the crowd of counterinsurgency experts and Washington insiders was adoring. The next day the participants set to work on revising the first draft of the doctrine. It was path-breaking.
For decades, the American way of war had been to bludgeon the enemy so thoroughly with heavy firepower that he would realize he had no chance and submit quickly. In this way, the Army hoped to avoid drawn-out conflicts like Vietnam that sapped both the military’s willingness to fight and the support of the public at home. This approach was the essence of the so-called Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the 1991 Gulf War. As he first had done twenty years earlier in his dissertation, Petraeus took direct aim at Powell’s tenet that the country could simply choose not to fight in messy guerrilla wars. “Most enemies of the United States … know they cannot compete with U.S. forces” in a conventional war, the 453-page manual began. “Instead they try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining and outlasting public support.”
The most radical aspect of the manual was its insistence that the primary focus in counterinsurgency wars should be on protecting the civilian population and not on killing the enemy. It made this point in a series of Zen-like warnings dubbed the “paradoxes of counterinsurgency.”
“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is,” one of the Powell Doctrine-defying precepts maintained. And so it went, point after point: “Sometimes, doing nothing is the best reaction.” “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot.”
Petraeus’s manual also attacked an idea that had become gospel in the Army during the 1990s peacekeeping missions—that protecting the force was of paramount importance in low-intensity wars. The manual insisted that in counterinsurgency wars soldiers had to assume greater risks in order to distinguish the enemy from the innocents, safeguard the population, and in the end achieve greater safety. “The more you protect the force, the less secure you may be,” the doctrine warned.
The new manual received lavish press coverage engineered by Petraeus, who acted as his own publicist. Most generals keep journalists at arm’s length, believing the surest way to stunt their careers is to appear to be grandstanding in the press. Petraeus was different. He courted journalists with the same intensity he brought to every task, remembering their names and returning their e-mails at all hours. Thanks to Petraeus’s finely tuned public relations sense, stories about his new doctrine and the brain trust that developed it were featured on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. The doctrine’s authors even made an appearance on Charlie Rose, and Lieutenant Colonel Nagl had a seven-minute sit-down with comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In the history of Army manuals, there had been nothing like it. In its first week, the manual was downloaded more than 1.5 million times. It was later reprinted by the University of Chicago Press as a paperback, and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review.
The manual helped the exhausted Army feel as if it had expertise in the type of warfare it was facing in Iraq, and it positioned Petraeus as the most cogent thinker about the deepest strategic and tactical questions the country was facing. Anybody could see he wanted to get back to the war. In his second-floor office at Leavenworth, he would obsessively log on to the classified computer network used by commanders in the war, tracking operations, movements of units, and casualties as they unfolded four thousand miles away.
As Petraeus plotted his return, Pete Chiarelli was already on his way back to Iraq. In December 2005, the White House had nominated him for a third star and appointed him to serve under Casey as the commander in charge of daily military operations for a force that now numbered 160,000 U.S. troops along with 23,000 more from Britain and a smattering from other countries. Chiarelli was ecstatic.
He had only been back from his first tour since March, but it had been a restless few months. After returning to Fort Hood and spending a few weeks with his family, he had headed for Washington to deliver briefings at the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, and at some foreign policy think tanks about his year in Iraq. The road show, as he called his presentation, was a hit. What 1st Cav and USAID had accomplished in Sadr City was a blueprint, he argued, for the unconventional approach the U.S. government, both military and civilians, needed to try throughout Iraq. He talked about the April firefight in Sadr City with a passion that few other generals could duplicate. As he spoke, an aide would unveil a chart that showed attacks concentrated in areas with the worst government services. It was followed by another chart that showed violence dropping off almost entirely after the money started flowing and the jobs programs got under way.
At a time when there was little good news from Iraq, Chiarelli was one senior officer who exuded confidence. Chiarelli’s ideas also had some appeal to the Bush administration. He wasn’t insisting that the answer was more troops, a prerequisite for any general who hoped to earn Rumsfeld’s nod.
For once his timing was perfect. Major General John Batiste, who had been chosen as Casey’s deputy, suddenly retired out of frustration with Rumsfeld and the way the war was being fought. Rumsfeld needed a bright former division commander, preferably with Iraq experience, to take Batiste’s place. The assignment went to Chiarelli.
The nationwide elections that month came off even better than expected. Nearly three-quarters of Iraq’s registered voters cast ballots on a day that was largely free of attacks. As expected, the clear victors were the Shiite parties, known as the United Iraqi Coalition, which won 128 seats. But Sunnis, who had largely boycotted the previous votes, turned out in much higher numbers, and the four main Sunni blocs won 59 seats in the 275-member parliament, up from 17.
Ever the optimist, Chiarelli hoped Iraq had turned a corner. The victorious parties still needed to choose a prime minister and form a government, a process that would grind on for several months. But maybe, Chiarelli told himself, the next government would be less treacherous than Jaafari’s crowd. He took over as Casey’s deputy on January 17, moving into his own lakeside villa at Camp Victory, two houses down from his boss’s quarters. Now that he had responsibility for the entire country, Chiarelli was brimming with ideas. His new civilian aide, Celeste Ward, suggested mapping out the still-to-be-named prime minister’s first 100 days in office. Maybe the new leader could visit all eighteen provinces, including Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, where voter turnout had been poor. At each stop he’d present a check for a new reconstruction project, such as a water-treatment plant or a school, as a visible sign of national reconciliation.
Once the new government was in place, Casey was eager to start reducing the size of the force to about 110,000 troops by the fall, with the first cuts coming in January. He also wanted to shrink the number of coalition bases by half, to about fifty. Fewer bases would drive home the idea that the new government was in control. Casey and Chiarelli hoped that once the new government was in place, Iraq would stabilize.
Not
everyone agreed. The biggest reservations came from military intelligence officers who had been fretting over the possibility of a coming Sunni-Shiite civil war for almost a year. Colonel Marcus Kuiper, Chiarelli’s senior intelligence officer, was on his first tour of Iraq and had been in the country for only a few weeks, but he’d seen analyses from his predecessors. He sensed that the elections and wrangling over the next prime minister in parliament were likely to heighten sectarian tensions. “We’re going to have great difficulty making progress until the Shia feel secure and the Sunnis feel they can’t overthrow the government,” he told Chiarelli. The worst-case scenario was a major attack by Sunni extremists. Chiarelli listened, but Kuiper could tell his boss thought the assessment was too dire.
On February 22, Sunni religious extremists struck the Al Askaria Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, destroying its famous golden dome. By evening Casey’s cell phone was ringing incessantly with calls from panicked Sunni officials. Do something fast, they pleaded. Sunni mosques were being burned to the ground by revenge-minded Shiites. The country was on the verge of a bloodbath. From his base in Tampa, Abizaid told his staff to shift surveillance drones and other intelligence-gathering equipment from Afghanistan to Iraq. “Give them all they need,” he ordered. “This attack could unhinge everything.” Casey and Chiarelli flooded the streets with troops, and Chiarelli caught the head of the Iraqi ground forces on his way to the airport for a trip to the United States and convinced him not to leave.