The Fourth Star

by Greg Jaffe

  But Bush had concluded that if his administration didn’t do something to arrest the decline, Congress was likely to force a withdrawal. Even staunch Republicans were losing patience with the war. “We’ve got to go after JAM before the summer,” he argued. The discussion resumed the following day, with Bush pressing the case for more troops and Casey resisting. “We’ve got sufficient forces in Iraq,” Casey emphasized at one point, noting that, for all the country’s problems, the Iraqi army was not splintering along sectarian lines.

  Abizaid, who was also present, took a middle course. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re against the surge?” Bush asked him.

  “No, that’s not what I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you the pluses and minuses of it,” he replied. The extra troops would show commitment, reduce sectarian violence, and buy Maliki and other leaders time to make necessary political compromises. On the negative side, the surge would add strain to an already stretched Army, prevent the United States from addressing the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and constrain the president’s ability to use ground forces if there was a flare-up with Iran. Abizaid also warned that unless the State Department devoted more people and money to developing Iraq’s government and economy, the surge wouldn’t work.

  Bush had already made up his mind. A temporary increase in forces might be “a bridge to a better place,” he suggested. “Perhaps,” Casey replied, giving slightly.

  Bush didn’t blame Casey for the failures in Iraq. “Everything he did, I approved. I am not going to make him the fall guy for my strategy,” the president told his staff. Casey had inherited a mess when he arrived in Iraq more than two years earlier. The resistance had been growing and there was virtually no strategy to combat it. Neither he nor his troops had had any experience or training in fighting a counterinsurgency war. Casey had made mistakes. He’d underestimated the difficulty of building competent Iraqi security forces and had too much faith that elections would curb sectarian behavior and unite the country. But he’d also received little help or guidance from the rest of the U.S. government.

  In late December, Gates arrived in Baghdad on his first overseas trip since taking over as defense secretary. He had sent word ahead of time that he needed a few minutes with Casey. When they were alone, Gates got straight to the point. The Army chief of staff job would be coming open in a few months, and Casey was the leading candidate. Was he interested? Gates asked. Casey said he was. He had been thinking about leaving Iraq for a while but wasn’t sure where he would go next. The chief’s job was the highest-ranking post in the Army. It was the job his father had once seemed destined to claim.

  Chiarelli’s last day in Iraq was spent waiting for a plane. His one-year tour complete, he had handed over command to Lieutenant General Ray Odierno the day before and was due to leave that afternoon with his headquarters staff for Germany, where Beth and other families were waiting for their arrival. Everything about that year had been difficult, and leaving was no exception. The C-17 that was supposed to carry them home was late. Hour after hour he and his headquarters staff sat sprawled at the Glass House, a building away from the main Baghdad airport terminal that served as a VIP lounge. Even this long into the occupation, the place was a mess, with plywood boards covering the broken glass panels, and cheap and ripped chairs the only places to sit except for the floor. Their wait was the Air Force’s revenge for all the times he’d yelled at them, Chiarelli joked with his chief of staff, Brigadier General Don Campbell. As it got late, foraging parties set off in search of food. Somebody suggested going back to Al Faw Palace for the night, but Chiarelli said no: they should sit in the terminal until the plane arrived, whenever that was.

  “I just don’t have the same feeling of accomplishment as I did when I left the last time,” Chiarelli told Campbell, referring to his tour with 1st Cav. He looked tired. He had been smoking too much and sleeping only four or five hours a night. Even now that it was over, he couldn’t stop replaying all that had gone wrong. Chiarelli was still hopeful he might be returning for a third tour in only a matter of months. He was already planning what he would do differently. “Will you come back with me?” he asked Campbell.

  As his departure approached, he had written a long memo about everything that had gone wrong during the preceding year. Even the title, “What Happened During My Tenure,” captured Chiarelli’s shock and disillusionment. It was nearly six pages of observations, each carefully numbered, most of them about the Iraqi government’s failings: “We had high hopes that [Maliki] would come in and energetically help to stabilize the situation… What followed, unfortunately, was stasis and then a slow but definite growth of sectarianism on the part of the government… The IPs [Iraqi police] were corrupt and often participated in sectarian violence (kidnappings, torture, executions)… The Prime Minister has called us off of operations against JAM numerous times… We also have direct evidence that people from his office were tipping off potential targets.”

  Chiarelli did not spare his own government. He had been reading a book entitled Bureaucracy Does Its Thing, a classic study written in 1973 by Robert Komer, a former CIA official sent to Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson to lead the civilian reconstruction effort. Komer had written his penetrating indictment of the war effort upon returning to the United States, and Chiarelli found that much in the three-decade-old essay still applied to Iraq. “Robert Komer’s observations,” he wrote, “are frighteningly apt here… ‘The sheer incapacity of the regimes we backed, which largely frittered away the enormous resources we gave them, may well have been the single greatest constraint on our ability to achieve the aims we set ourselves at acceptable cost.’” He closed the memo with thoughts about how to shift course. “The good news is that we still do have tools at our disposal, and some of our tools we have failed to use to their full capacity.” Chiarelli hoped he would have another chance to command.

  Their plane finally arrived the next morning, and he and his staff loaded their gear into the belly of the cargo jet and flew home to Germany. They arrived a few hours later to a heroes’ welcome in Heidelberg, held in the post gymnasium. Beth, his daughter, Erin, and his son, Peter, greeted him. Soon after his arrival they left on a skiing vacation in the Austrian Alps with Don Campbell and his family. Chiarelli was a nervous wreck, religiously checking his e-mail, hoping he would get a message about his next assignment. He heard nothing. At the end of their weeklong vacation, as the Chiarellis and Campbells were driving back to Heidelberg, they stopped along the highway for a snack and saw a German newspaper with a picture of Dave Petraeus on the front page. Chiarelli translated the story with his rusty German. Petraeus, it seemed to be saying, was the leading candidate to replace Casey. A few days later came the official announcement: Bush had chosen Petraeus as the next top commander in Iraq.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Army of the Tigris

  Baghdad

  February 8, 2007

  At 7:27 a.m. Casey took his place before a wall of video screens and waited for the first briefer to start his morning update. Instead Petraeus’s image popped up on one of the screens in front of him. “General Casey, sir, Dave Petraeus here. How are you doing this morning?” he asked, his voice echoing through the room. Petraeus had just arrived in Baghdad and was scheduled to take command from Casey in two days.

  “Good morning, Dave,” Casey muttered. He was running the briefing from the Green Zone and Petraeus was at Al Faw Palace a few miles away. He hadn’t expected to see his replacement turn up so soon, and his weary tone made clear that he was ready to drop the pleasantries and get on with the day’s business. Petraeus didn’t seem to get the message, and he tried to make conversation by discussing Casey’s nomination to be Army chief of staff. “Congratulations on your nomination getting through the Senate Armed Services Committee,” he continued. “Let’s hope for a similar result when the vote goes to the full Senate.” Several officers in the room blanched. The Senate had unanimously confirmed Petraeus for h
is new job, and his remark inadvertently seemed to imply that Casey might have a tougher time on Capitol Hill. A handful of prominent Republicans had already indicated that they were going to vote against him. Casey said nothing.

  “Sir, your relief is here. You’re supposed to be smiling,” Petraeus joked, trying one last time. Casey gazed up at his replacement’s image on the screen in front of him. After an exhausting two and a half years in Iraq, he was ready to go home, but not on such a low note. “I am smiling on the inside, Dave,” he said.

  His final days in Baghdad were full of small ceremonies and reminders that he was not leaving in triumph. Two weeks before, Casey had jetted back to Washington for the hearing on his nomination. In the Senate hearing room bright television lights shone in his face as he stared up at the two dozen lawmakers in front of him. He knew many in official Washington thought that he was being given the chief’s job as a consolation prize. The unspoken comparison was to General William Westmoreland, who’d presided over a losing war and returned to lead the Army. The thought burned him. Serving as Army chief shouldn’t be a reward, he bluntly told the lawmakers. It was a duty. “It’s about personal commitment to the men and women of the United States Army,” he said.

  For Casey the three-hour confirmation hearing had become an endurance test; the key to surviving it was not to let the senators get to him. “That was sealed in my mind,” he recalled. The toughest moment had come early on under questioning from Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam who also came from a proud military family. McCain, who was readying his run for the presidency, had softened his criticism of Bush’s wartime command. He now placed the blame for the failure in Iraq squarely on Casey, and his disgusted tone made it clear that he considered Casey’s time in Iraq an unmitigated failure.

  Sheila Casey, sitting in the front row, seethed at McCain’s rough treatment of her husband. Two years earlier he’d sought her out at a Washington party to praise her husband’s leadership. She couldn’t fathom how his opinion of her husband could have changed so radically, except that he was now running for president. Although McCain insisted that he wasn’t questioning Casey’s patriotism or honor, the senator clearly was attacking Casey’s intelligence and military judgment. The general’s sins were denial and inaction. As sectarian violence rose, Casey had continued to offer up “unrealistically rosy” assessments of the war, McCain complained. Instead of arresting the decline by pushing more troops deep into Iraq’s most violent cities, the general had stuck with his approach of building up Iraqi forces and searching for a quick exit. “We have paid a very heavy price in American blood and treasure because of what is now agreed to by literally everyone as a failed policy,” McCain lectured.

  Democrat Senator Carl Levin prodded more gently, suggesting that even President Bush had conceded that Iraq was “maybe a slow failure.” Casey winced but refused to give an inch. “I actually don’t see it as a slow failure. I actually see it as slow progress,” he said softly. To Casey it seemed as if the White House and some Senate Republicans were trying to pin the failure in Iraq on him and shift the focus off the weakened president. He had been around Washington long enough to know that this was how politics worked. Still, he hated it.

  In his final meeting with Maliki after returning to Iraq, Casey presented the prime minister with the 9mm pistol that he’d carried throughout his Iraq tour. Although most U.S. officials had serious doubts about Maliki, Casey still believed that he could overcome his paranoia and anti-Sunni impulses and effectively lead the country. “You are commander in chief. But soon you will have control of all of the Iraqi forces. I am giving you this as a symbol of the transfer,” he said, handing over the gun.

  He spent a couple of hours with Petraeus in his palace office. A month earlier President Bush had announced that he was sending five additional brigades, or about 20,000 troops, to Iraq. Bush was gambling that the extra soldiers could drive down the sectarian killing in the capital and give Sunni and Shiite leaders in the country some breathing room to reconcile. In his confirmation hearing, Petraeus said that he intended to push his troops into Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods, where they would live in small combat outposts and focus on protecting residents from the roving death squads and suicide car bombs. As they sat at the mahogany table, Casey urged Petraeus to be clear about the change. “Don’t pretend that you’re still trying to put the Iraqis in the lead when you’re taking over security responsibility from them,” he said. “You owe it to the troops.”

  Casey disagreed with the new strategy and insisted that, despite the rising violence, the government and security forces were still improving. “You’re in a lot better shape than people back in the U.S. think you are,” he said. Petraeus listened and scribbled a few notes. He felt a twinge of sympathy mixed with disbelief. After four years of war, Casey and Petraeus shared more than they sometimes acknowledged. They had spent more time in Iraq than any other Army generals and knew better than any of their colleagues the intense pressure and loneliness of commanding. Casey had given two and a half years of his life to a strategy that was clearly failing, Petraeus thought. Now he couldn’t admit he was losing.

  The change-of-command ceremony took place the following day with Abizaid, who was in his final months as the head of Central Command, in charge of the proceedings. The three generals marched into the palace’s cavernous rotunda, where a crowd of about 200 had assembled. Iraqi generals and cabinet ministers filled the first two rows of seats. American officers, a mix of field generals and cubicle dwellers, sat behind them. The official change of command took only a few seconds. A military band played the 101st Airborne Division song in honor of Petraeus. Then Abizaid passed the Multi-National Force-Iraq flag, a gold-fringed banner bearing the image of a winged Mesopotamian bull, to a sergeant major, who handed it to Casey. Casey presented the flag to Petraeus, who gripped it tightly with both hands and flashed the ceremony’s only smile.

  Abizaid stepped up to the lectern and did his best to buck up Casey. “History will smile upon your accomplishments,” he intoned, his voice bouncing off the palace’s marble walls. With his arms folded across his chest and his legs crossed, Casey looked as if he were trying to roll up into a ball. His eyes flitted over the rotunda’s crystal chandelier and marble columns the width of redwoods. In all his years in the military he had never felt so alone.

  After Abizaid spoke, Casey stood at the makeshift lectern in Al Faw Palace. In his remarks he didn’t let any of his anger show. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he praised Petraeus and in a final defense of his strategy expressed optimism that soon the country would be able to “assume responsibility for its own security.” From the moment he had arrived in Iraq Casey had been determined to start bringing soldiers home. He’d constantly been casting about for the always elusive Iraq exit strategy. He wanted to win, but he also was determined to shield his Army as much as possible from the long, grinding war. “I didn’t want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary,” he said repeatedly during his Senate hearing.

  Now it was clear that Petraeus was going to take the war in a completely different direction. His remarks, which followed Casey’s, signaled more than just the changing of the guard in Iraq. They marked the end of the post-Vietnam era for the Army. Ever since the disastrous war, senior Army leaders had tried, and ultimately failed, to keep their force from becoming too deeply embroiled in messy political wars that defied standard military solutions. It was a pattern that had repeated itself in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and then Iraq, where generals often focused more on exit strategies than on plans for victory. Petraeus wasn’t interested in the drawdown plans often advanced by Casey. Instead he wanted to push U.S. troops into cities and leave them there. Only a heavy and sustained American presence could win the war, he believed.

  He spoke first to his troops. Their job was to reduce the violence and protect the people so that the government could function and the economy might return to lif
e. “These tasks are achievable. The mission is doable,” he said, leaning forward and gripping the lectern with his left hand.

  Next he spoke to the Iraqis. In his previous two tours he had sat through countless lectures from sheikhs, generals, and politicians recounting the country’s history as the birthplace of learning and the cradle of civilization. Petraeus addressed them as if he were the supreme sheikh of a proud tribe, referring to their country majestically as the “land between two rivers.” He had come back to help the Sha’ab al-Iraqi—the Iraqi people—build a new country and realize “the abundant blessings bestowed by the Almighty on Mesopotamia.” His last words were in Arabic. “Baraak Allah fee a sha’ab al-Iraqi,” Petraeus said—may God bless the Iraqi people.

  A snare drum snapped out a deliberate tempo, and the three generals marched out of the rotunda. Petraeus rushed off to meet with the staff he was inheriting from Casey and set them to work on his new strategy. Casey paused on his way out the door to shake hands, force a last smile for his staff, and pose for pictures before he boarded a cargo plane headed home. After a few minutes, he glanced up and noticed that Iraq’s defense minister, interior minister, and national security advisor had all formed a tight circle around him. The middle-aged men with graying hair and mustaches looked to Casey as if they had no idea what came next. They stared at him. Casey stared back. Eventually he draped his arms over their shoulders. “You guys are going to be fine,” he said. “You know what to do.” He was probably the only one in the palace who believed it.

  While he was back in the States, Petraeus had done his best to keep up with the classified intelligence assessments produced by Casey’s command, but the reports didn’t fully capture how bad conditions had become. The night of the change-of-command ceremony he flew into the Green Zone for a welcome dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Even before the main course had been served, Defense Minister Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi and the Speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, began screaming at each other. Both men were Sunnis. The volatile Mashhadani castigated Obaidi for not doing enough to help his Sunni brothers. Rising to his feet, Obaidi shouted that he was defense minister for all Iraqis, regardless of sect or ethnicity. The only thing that was stopping the two men from throwing punches was the narrow table. The U.S. ambassador calmed the two men down, but a few minutes later the screaming erupted again. A dispirited Petraeus excused himself before dessert. “I’ve got to get back to Camp Victory,” he lied. “We have another update tonight.”